If you use the Xbox store to buy either Xbox or PC games—and yes, the latter is possible—you may be prompted to verify your age the next time you try to buy an R18+ game.

Microsoft confirmed as much via emails sent to users over the weekend, which I received. "Starting August 2026, to comply with Australia regulations, you may need to verify your age before purchasing or accessing apps and games rated 18+ on Microsoft Store and Xbox Store," the email reads.

To verify your age with Microsoft you can use email-based verification, a facial age estimation check via "secure selfie", a credit card or a government issued ID which can include a driver's license or passport. Verification is done via London-based tech company VerifyMy.

Age verification software has come under deserved scrutiny this year. In February, security researchers claim to have found that verification provider Persona is not only lax with information security but also does a lot more than simply verify your age. Persona is among the most widely used verification providers, with Roblox, Twitch and VRChat using the software. Discord trialed it on its UK users.

Separately, a 2025 Discord data breach resulted in 70,000 government photo IDs being compromised. Dovetailing with these obvious info security issues are growing fears that age verification technology, under the guise of protecting children from adult content, is just a trojan horse for more surveillance.

As of early 2026 both Australia and the UK have new age verification requirements, as do 25 states in the US. That said, not all companies are acting fast to abide: Steam, for instance, hasn't implemented more rigorous age verification in Australia, nor has PlayStation.

Games about cleaning are the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy.

But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten ruin into a quaint and personalised space. Then there's stuff like Chibi-Robo and Katamari Damacy.

Not all cleaning games are cosy or sim-oriented. Viscera Cleanup Detail is about cleaning blood 'n' guts and The Gunk is a 3D platformer about eliminating space gunk in order to, I'm not sure, probably save the world. And the recent wave of retail simulators have lots of cleaning and sorting.

But the cleaning or tidying game has evolved once again. Its newest manifestation may clock as either a living nightmare or the height of blissful stimulation, depending on your temperament.

To demonstrate, here's the trailer for Toy Shop Tidy Up, which launched on August 7:

With all due respect to both the creators Shiftmoon and those enthusiastic about this new virtual-tidying frontier, this trailer gives me a panic attack. But it's far from the only recent PC game focused entirely on sorting through a massive pile of objects all the better to place them on shelves.

Toy Shop Tidy Up has only been a very modest success so far, but the Steam user reviews so far offer some insight into the appeal of this microgenre.

"Great base game, but the one thing I wish it had, would be that the toys had their own spot to put them in, rather than just being able to place them anywhere in the area," writes Sosich. Another user, Joker, agrees. "Great base game, but the one thing I wish it had, would be that the toys had their own spot to put them in, rather than just being able to place them anywhere in the area."

For a more demanding experience, these users have a number of games to choose from, all released in 2026. Cellar Keeper, also released on August 7, plonks the player in a wine cellar and tasks them with returning exactly 2,448 wine bottles to their "proper" shelf. In other words, critics of Toy Shop Tidy Up will be pleased, because every bottle must be sorted by their variety and stacked exactly where it belongs.

"Watching disorder disappear is its own reward," promises the store description.

Many user reviews of Cellar Keeper refer back to what is clearly considered the high watermark of this burgeoning orthodoxy: Released in April, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! has players inhabit a cosy oaken library strewn with 3,072 books. These must all go back on shelves, and in the right order. Among the key features of Librarian are listed "visual satisfaction" and "strategic efficiency".

Librarian is by far the most successful sorting game thus far: its peak all-time concurrent players figure is 29,469. Over 3,200 people are playing it as I write. It has over 17,000 "very positive" reviews.

Taking a more arch approach is Supermarket Chaos, which crash landed onto Steam on June 30. Thanks to an errant robot shelf-stacker with a sudden distaste for order, groceries have been left in a big messy pile on the floor. It is your job, of course, to put everything back where it belongs. This outing offers three maps, with the most challenging containing 9999 objects. Thankfully, online cooperative play is supported.

The most terrifying entry in this genre isn't out yet, but it does make me thirst for whisky: Never Sort By Color, which dares release in November, takes the same tack as all the previously listed games except you're sorting Lego in a room littered with 100,000 bricks. Thankfully you've got a grappling hook, a sieve tray and other tools to help.

And that's not all! Arriving next week is TV Archive: Tidy Up Together, which is the inevitable retro videostore take on the genre. Last week's Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery is about finding puzzle pieces in a whitewalled gallery space, all the better to re-apply them to art works. And also coming next week is Tidy Up Together. I think by now you get the idea.

And like the now-ubiquitous retail sims, sorting simulators are being turned out at a rapid pace to capitalise on the actual commercial success of Librarian. In August alone, and not including those listed above, all of these are listed as forthcoming: Sort Them Ducks, Shelve the Potions!, Shelves & Sorcery, Mall Tidy Up Together, Konbini Cleanup, Storehand, Old Market Restored, Tidy Mart, Game Shop Panic, Big Bad Pharma, Package Chaos and Megastore Tidy Up Together.

There are heaps more "scheduled" for September 2026 and "Q3" as well. Will all of these come out? I severely doubt it. But you're going to start seeing a lot more of these on Steam in the coming months.

Top Steam games by revenue (July 28 - August 4)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the chart below doesn't account for the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria, the QuakeCon-themed Bethesda sale, or the recent surprise update and deep discount on Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Mistfall Hunter is inevitably quite high on the list, though we are in a major release slump. The Soulslike extraction RPG only has around 4,700 "mixed" reviews right now, though its player count is consistently much higher than that would normally imply. Its current 24-hour peak concurrents in 37,123 (the record is 44,472).

Studio Bellring Games wrote on August 7 that over a million players had signed in to Mistfall Hunter. That includes both PS5 and Xbox users. It's doing well but—and this still feels surprising to me—not as well as recent hits like Meccha Chameleon.

Three games on the list are there because of major sales: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3 and Spider-Man 2.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Worst game I have ever played. I got this game in a random Steam key bundle for about €5 along with five other games because it was on sale, and I still regret buying it. I think I would enjoy being electrocuted more."

Qube37, on the joys of electrocution compared to the drudgery that is Cyberpunk SFX.

Tom Clancy's The Division Resurgence originally launched on mobile before coming to PC via Ubisoft Connect (the artist formerly known as Uplay) in April. Earlier this month it arrived on Steam, where it hasn't received the warmest welcome.

Overall its review rating is currently sitting at "mixed" with just 46% of reviews leaning to the positive. Players are frustrated by login issues, mouse bugs, and the looter-shooter's combination of underwhelming rewards and overwhelming microtransactions.

"Calling it slop disrespects actual slop", says one user review. "I've seen Korean gacha games with less microtransaction than this. This is scummy even for a F2P. It has [t]he most distracting, convoluted, overcomplicated on purpose and bad thought UI and Menus design I've ever seen in a video-game. You spend more time micro-managing than playing missions!"

"Complete ass game", begins another review. "Balancing is the main issue, as well as loot progression. All the loot is locked behind daily completions, and you only get to do those maybe 4-5 times a day. Then the game scales the xp and rewards down hard! This isn't a looter-shooter, its a daily log-in simulator with Division like systems. Like what everyone else is saying, just play Division 1 or 2, this game isn't worth the time."

As with the mainline Division games, it's a third-person shooter where you play a member of the Strategic Homeland Division trying to restore order after the "Green Flu" epidemic reduces the USA to chaos. Like the first game it's set in New York, and lets you fight your way across locations like Liberty Island and the New York Stock Exchange, for which you're rewarded with loot like a selection of slightly different tactical beanies and baseball caps.

In a new episode of The Examined Game podcast (spotted by GamesRadar), longtime Bethesda environment artist and The Axis Unseen dev Nate Purkeypile spoke about his time at the legendary studio, including what he found to be Starfield's biggest design misstep.

Purkeypile had the title of "environment artist" at Bethesda, but his work seems to have extended into what would traditionally be considered level design. In addition to setting up the layout for Starfield's city of Neon⁠—which remained largely the same in the released game, according to Purkeypile⁠—the dev spoke about his contributions to Little Lamplight and Diamond City in Fallouts 3 and 4. He left Bethesda a year into Starfield's development, and released his first solo game, The Axis Unseen, in 2024.

Purkeypile spoke about the importance of deliberate design and points of interest in making areas late in the interview. "I think it's good to spend as little time as possible in menus, especially when it comes to exploration like that," said Purkeypile. Host Steven Lake asked if this was an issue Purkeypile saw coming in Starfield's development, a more disjointed, menu-driven system of travel.

"It's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all," the developer asserted. "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts," something that sounds like Obsidian's approach to The Outer Worlds. "Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out.

"I was like, I don't think this is a good idea. If you're going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That's not procedural. You go to like the major city in Starfield and it's huge, but then like outside the city, there's nothing. And it's like this doesn't even make sense as a world."

This is certainly a big stumbling block I encountered playing Starfield, but I'm bummed to see Mass Effect 1 catching strays⁠—it feels like I'm the only person in the world who liked ME1's uncharted worlds. But even here, I see a distinction from Starfield. There were maybe two dozen procedurally generated planets in Mass Effect, and they contrasted sharply with the more structured gameplay in the main story.

Back to Starfield, this has been a frequent topic of conversation on the PC Gamer team: There's not really a Starfield equivalent to being on your way to Riften, only to get distracted by a dozen different sidequests en route. It's a problem that, hopefully as a matter of basic structure, we won't encounter in Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6. Elsewhere in the same interview, Purkeypile talked about how he's looking forward to how the Fallout 3 remaster will change the game.

Lies of P studio Nough, formerly Round8, has released a 16-minute mini documentary about its culture and work on the Lies of P series, including development anecdotes and talk of the developers' ambitions for Lies of P's in-production sequel.

But first, the name change: According to the video description, Nough is "upholding the development philosophy of Round8 Studio and operating under the motto 'Games by Gamers.'"

It's not entirely clear to me whether Nough is a full rebrand of Round8, or rather spun off from the original company, itself a subsidiary of publisher Neowiz. The end result is the same as far as we're concerned, I think: The people who made Lies of P are Nough now, a portmanteau of "Not Enough." Neat.

The studio is still tight lipped about the Lies of P sequel, which we know is in full production, but has yet to get a formal reveal or even name. The Nough devs were very open about their ambitions to make a bigger, better game, though.

"From the very start, my goal has been to create the world's greatest action game," said combat director Lee Jeonghyeon. "And we're getting there, one step at a time."

Overall director Choi Jiwon said that the team wants to match the passion they brought to Lies of P, and make a game they'd like to play. "The players can always tell," Choi said. "As a gamer myself, I know they can tell when a game has been made with real dedication."

Choi concluded the video by calling on fans to trust the process. "We're giving everything we have to make it the best it can be," said Choi. "So please wait just a little bit longer. We won't let you down. I promise."

A big portion of the video's runtime was dedicated to the unique way Nough tested Lies of P and Overture, and continues to test the unnamed sequel. Choi streams a playtest of the game to the company at major milestones, showing how it's coming together.

More periodically, Nough has a "Game Day" where the entire studio puts aside regular work to play as much of the current build as possible, then fills a survey about the experience. According to the documentary, this feedback resulted in Lies of P's difficulty modes, as well as major cuts and a story shift on Overture.

This approach seems to be working out. While PCG news writer Lincoln Carpenter liked but didn't love Lies of P in his 74% review, I've heard nothing but good things about the Overture expansion. News writer Harvey Randall is putting his faith in Lies of P 2 sight unseen based on the strength of Overture.

So I've recently given in and decided I won't be waiting for Deltarune's final chapter before I played it all in one go—too many of my mates were talking about it, so I sat my butt down to get ahead of the invariable, accidental spoilers and chew through chapters one to five.

You don't need me to tell you that Toby Fox, developer of Deltarune (and Undertale preceding it) is an excellent composer. The dude made Megalovania, which has somehow survived being piledrivered into memedom, even by the Pope of all people, and still, inevitably, slaps. But the rest of his discography is flooded with bangers. The man can work a leitmotif, lemme tell ya.

Deltarune is no different, though for this Soundtrack Sunday, I want to focus heavily on one song from it: The Third Sanctuary, because this song might be one of my favourite tunes in a videogame ever. I cannot stop listening to this thing, even if it's a nightmarish affront to rhythm.

Spoilers for Chapter 4, if you've not played it yet.

The Third Sanctuary plays in Chapter 4 during the recreation of the church dark world, spawned from the hands of your good time pal and occasional chalk-eating high school dinosaur friend (I promise you this makes perfect sense if you play the game) Susie.

This attempt at recreation is somewhat flawed—see, a dark world in Deltarune is a reflection of the objects around it, who turn into its inhabitants, but it's also a reflection of the person who created it. Susie is uncertain and conflicted for so many reasons I could write a whole other article on them.

An uncertain, mysterious prophecy weighing overhead that Susie has sworn to defy. A realisation that her new mentor figure died years ago, his ashes scattered over a hammer in the next room over. The dark world she creates is a mirror to the one the chapter primarily takes place in, reflecting this—and The Third Sanctuary represents this fragile ground by, well, just give it a listen.

Even if you don't know anything about how music is constructed, you can sense the trepidation and strangeness in it—the starting, the stopping. The next bar of the song starts just a half-heartbeat before (or after) you think it's gonna.

That's due to its use of unusual time signatures, which I'll try my best to explain. A time signature is a representation of rhythm in a song, the most ubiquitous form being 4/4, four beats in each bar. The second (bottom) number represents what kind of beats they are, also known as the note value, and the first (top) number represents how many of them are in a bar.

Britney Spear's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is a good 4/4 song to get your brain around the concept—sing the titular line to yourself while counting to four, and you'll feel the rhythm: Hit(1) me Ba(2)-by One(3) more time(4)!

Another time signature you might be familiar with is 3/4 time, where there are three beats in a bar—this is what most waltzes are constructed out of (bum-BAH-BAH, bum-BAH-BAH). There's also 5/4, which is most famously associated with the Mission Impossible theme tune.

I won't go too far into the second number, but to keep it very simple: It's always 2, 4, 8, or 16—2 is a half-note, 4 is a quarter-note, and so on. These can be interchangeable, for instance, you could write a 3/4 song as a 3/8 song, if you wanted—you'd just have to adjust the length of the notes accordingly, but because the number of beats in a bar isn't changing, they can be functionally identical-sounding.

So, what time signature does The Third Sanctuary use? Yes. Yes is the answer.

The Third Sanctuary starts out in 9/4 time, then jolts to 11/8 time with a random 4/8 thrown in there (because why not), interludes with 5/4, back to 11/8, jumpscares you with two bars of 12/8, back to 5/4 for a bit, and then the finale: A dance between 12/8 and 11/8, alternating, because who needs to be able to keep track of anything.

You can use an excellent visualiser, created by YouTuber 17a and embedded above, to keep track—and while this might seem like utter madness, Toby Fox isn't just goofing off here and attempting to make drum cover artists have a heart attack, he's using it to tell a story.

This chapter's been out for a while now, so I am by no means the only person to come up with this analysis. But The Third Sanctuary's time signatures of 12/8 and 11/8 don't just clash with each other, they slowly come together over the course of the song, as though comforting each other in the darkness of Chapter 4—quite fittingly, finding each other in the dark.

The melodies present in those final bars swell and grow hopeful, despite the uncertain, stuttering strangeness of the time signatures they're trapped in. More importantly, the main melody bridges the gap between those time signatures and flows over them in a determined way, just like Susie herself after discovering the grim truth of a (yet-to-be-revealed) prophecy.

The Third Sanctuary is incredible not just because it sounds good in spite of its time signatures, but because through them it tells the story of the entire chapter. When a friend of mine showed their musician pal the track, their analysis pretty much accurately summed up the major themes of the story despite the fact they'd never played it.

And then there's the covers and the fan songs that have spun out of it. For the former, I'd like to share this lovely rendition by the Live Videogame Orchestra—something about hearing actual, breathing musicians manage to get a handle on the track is kinda magical.

But there's also fan-inspired renditions. The hilariously-named 5ndth Sanctuary by IamDaDogeOfDaFuture is one of my favourites, having a wild run from 11/8, up to 15/8, up to 29/8—and still somehow managing to tickle my brain in a pleasing way. Here's the song impossibly mashed into 4/4. Here's the song in 5/4. People are playing with time and it's awesome.

Toby Fox has successfully created his own little genre-pod of Math Rock enthusiasts in Deltarune's fanbase, and I couldn't be more delighted. The Third Sanctuary is an utter mess, it's a drummer's nightmare, and it's also one of the most thoughtful moments of storytelling in a videogame, one that's inspired countless of time-signature mad renditions.

I leave you with 4rd (not a typo) Sanctuary. This actually isn't a fan-song, it's a version Toby put in Chapter 5. I'm not analysing it in this article, I've got other things to do, but I'd like you to listen to it anyway.

Excited for The Witcher to finally wrap up? No, I'm not talking about that Witcher 3 playthrough you abandoned after 70 hours of wandering around, I'm talking about the Netflix show probably best known for its prominent recast of Geralt and for being very different from the books and games. Well, it's been delayed (via What's on Netflix).

Even though it reportedly wrapped filming late last year, the story from What's on Netflix says that "a little digging" confirms "that the release has indeed shifted to next year, though Netflix has neither confirmed this publicly nor is thought to have locked in a specific 2027 release window just yet."

The article speculates that this is to brush up the VFX before release and move the show's finale away from other big releases, but there's no explicit confirmation as to why this delay has happened. It's a bummer if you've been chomping at the bit to see Liam Hemsworth totally witch all over the place, but since no major reshoots or further recasts have been confirmed, it's at least less grief than the God of War series is experiencing right now.

In the meantime, there are famously a lot of Witcher things you probably have to catch up on. Check out, for instance, our guide to reading the acclaimed novels by Andrzej Sapkowski and the associated comics—I have admittedly only read The Last Wish, but I recommend it for the short story where a goat man throws metal balls at Geralt while heckling him.

There's also, as you may have heard, a videogame series. I assume if you've gotten this far into this article you already like those games (at least more than Sapkowski does), so I'll recommend the Witcher let's play series by original lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec. Squint really hard, and mid-aughts CG Geralt probably looks a bit like Liam Hemsworth.

The studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch just had its third-biggest year for top line revenue ever, according to a leaked email. The email (via Windows Central) reportedly contained Blizzard president Johanna Faries praising the team for finishing off FY26 as "the top-performing studio in Xbox's studios division."

"Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred and Overwatch drove exceptional performance in particular, with Overwatch delivering its strongest quarter since 2022," she wrote. She said Overwatch has been growing for multiple consecutive years for the first time since its release, and that Blizzcon 2026 should "serve as a powerful springboard into a new era of momentum."

Notably, this success is despite the fact that Microsoft is a pressure target and Xbox is a priority target of the BDS movement protesting the involvement of corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians. And while Blizzard seemingly hasn't been pummeled by Xbox's 3,200-layoff "reset" the way studios like Double Fine and Zenimax have, a huge portion of the job cuts have yet to land.

Rumors are aswirl as to what's coming at the next Blizzcon, the first of what used to be an annual convention since 2023. A Starcraft shooter and a remixed follow-up to World of Warcraft Classic have both been speculated about endlessly. But each of those big moments, as well as diversions like WoW's Dungeons & Dragons crossover, seem to carry a big fat asterisk with the unfinished turmoil at Microsoft hanging overhead.

It seems clear that Xbox will be relying on the studio to help shore up its so-so financials as it attempts to "return to growth" by FY27—just two years after its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard resulted directly in 1,900 job cuts and at least one major game cancellation.

You've been shot, and I have the hit marker to prove it.

The humble hit marker glyph is a mainstay of the FPS user interface, dutifully reporting the fate of projectiles. Hit your target and 'X' marks the spot. See nothing, and you're hitting nothing. I like the hit marker—it's an absolute form of feedback unique to shooters, and I can think of a lot of games that wouldn't feel right without it.

But it's also a crutch. The hit marker is both overused and often misused, nowadays appearing in every game with a gun as if it's always the best form of communication. The mechanic has even penetrated the singleplayer arena, which is weird, because the studio that popularized the hit marker always meant it to be a multiplayer-only concession.

There are earlier examples of a hit marker, but it was made famous by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The 'X' glyph and gratifying "thwip" sound instantly became iconic to the series, but not the campaign. In fact, the majority of Call of Duty campaigns don't use them. I'm not aware of Infinity Ward ever commenting on why it decided this back in the day, but to me, it's obvious: The hit marker was superfluous to the campaign, because you knew you'd killed a guy as soon as he dropped dead.

Looking back at that campaign today, it still looks totally readable and natural:

I don't watch that and think "this could use some hit markers," and in fact, I think they'd detract from the experience. Hit markers make a lot of sense in the context of PvP, where it's helpful for network and competitive reasons to know exactly when your bullets are landing, but they undeniably add a layer of artifice. They're kind of ugly and distracting, to the point that they become the only visual cue I'm paying attention to in the heat of a match. Compare that older CoD to the recent Black Ops 7 campaign, which features hit markers and enemy health bars, and you do give up some immersive qualities.

Intuitive feedback

As anyone who played an FPS before 2007 can attest, developers were using more creative solutions to the same problems way before Modern Warfare came along: impact animations, wound FX, blood spurts. Land a shot, and the target itself reacts, not your UI. It's intuitive feedback—the videogame equivalent of "show, don't tell" filmmaking. When games really nail it (in singleplayer or multiplayer), it's better than a hit marker.

Which is why I'm calling out two series that definitely don't need hit markers, but have deemed them the default nonetheless:

Halo: Campaign Evolved, why have you cluttered up the HUD with hit markers when Bungie designed the original game around clear, diegetic feedback? I know my shot landed because an elite's energy shield flickered, a grunt died, or a jackal shield popped! Halo Studios (formerly 343) has been injecting hit markers into the series since Halo 4, and I don't love it.

And Gears of War: E-Day, you can do better! In 2006, Gear of War's solution to hit feedback was as elegant as it was gory: shoot a locust, and buckets of blood erupt from the wound. Hit; marked. But alas, The Coalition has succumbed to trends in E-Day, and hit markers are the default for both multiplayer and the campaign (if Microsoft's direct presentation from June is any indication). They work fine in the bits of the multiplayer beta I've played, but in turn, they've toned down blood spurts and made them less useful as an alternative. Perhaps a downgrade?

The old ways are far from extinct, but I do think the shift toward hit markers has given developers permission for their FPS to skimp on intuitive feedback.

This week I fired up Left 4 Dead 2 to remind myself what the pinnacle of hit feedback looks like. Then I played some Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock's spiritual successor to L4D that, among many changes, introduced hit markers.

Pretty big difference! Left 4 Dead 2's zombie animations, wounds, and ragdolls are still unbelievable. I love the way blood splatters on walls and zombies react to individual impacts where they're struck. It's not only impressive 17 years later, but looks cleaner than Back 4 Blood's in-your-face hit markers. Behind the flickering X's are some pretty bland, unremarkable zombies. Back 4 Blood's hordes don't run, react, or die with the same weight or realism, which is weird, because a lot of the core Left 4 Dead leadership returned to make it.

I'm always keen to read what you all think, but I'm especially interested to hear other perspectives on hit markers, so please do sound off in comments or my inbox (morgan.park@futurenet.com). Hit markers are now this omnipresent fixture of the genre, yet nobody really talks about them. They just sort of happened, then kept happening, then stuck.

I can turn an overgrown property into an industrial vineyard in a single year no problem. I've done it in the valleys, islands, and fields of countless farm sims. Usually it's just as easy to pluck one of its provincial hotties out of town to become my spouse (the overworked leader type, ideally), but magical girl-inspired Fields of Mistria has given me a bad case of choice paralysis. I love them all!

Fields of Mistria originally launched in early access with only the beginning of an already excellent story and two unlockable cutscenes per eligible single. Over the past two years it's added quality of life updates, story progression, and additional friendship and dating scenes. Mistria caps it all off this week with a 1.0 launch that completes the main story and, finally, adds the ability to get married. I would be psyched (I am psyched) except I've spent the past two years confessing my feelings to ten of them and if anything I'm less sure who to choose than before.

Fields of Mistria is steeped in nostalgia for '90s anime. It's got off-the-shoulder jackets. It's got shockingly high waist lines. It's got a guy who's rude right to my face and blushes when I'm nice to him anyway—a dynamic I'm too damn old for but lies dormant in the grey matter of my brain that solidified during the years Fruits Basket was in print. It's a sepia toned flashback to playing my Game Boy Advance in the third row of a minivan and drawing Edward Elric on filched printer paper.

I love how Mistria has characters for all my eras. The fifteen year old inside me will always have a soft spot for tsundere boys like March the blacksmith and arrogant beauties like Juniper the witch. In my twenties I'd have been swayed by Adeline the acting town leader who needs to take a break from organizing Mistria's earthquake recovery. Now I'm drawn to Ryis the carpenter, an unassuming 'guy next door' who moved from the city and isn't sure if he'll put down roots in the countryside.

Mistria pulls off a magical girl-worthy transformation on all those timeless anime tropes. They've got modern frills like loveable hunk Hayden being a pseudo single dad… to a prize-winning chicken. Sweet older sister Reina isn't relegated to unsung family cook; her parents support her chasing national recognition as a chef. Eiland the noble scion looks foppish at first but is way more obsessed with archaeology than his looks. They're all just a little deeper than their archetypes without ever really masking the fact that yeah, Juniper still is a classic arrogant villainess type.

The quality of Fields of Mistria's writing is what's made me so uncharacteristically indecisive. Even the best post-Stardew farm sims are cute but pretty shallow. Mistria is sneaky about how excellently it's written. Its tropey characters mean I'll never bring it up in a "good writing" conversation next to sharply smart things like Disco Elysium. Instead It's more like Avatar The Last Airbender, whose lighthearted tone masks a subtle maturity. Not the kind of maturity with swear words and dark topics, the kind that's emotionally earnest and resolves conflicts instead of omitting them.

After a decade of Stardew-chasing farm sims, Fields of Mistria is the first one to really recapture the magic for me. It addresses so many functional elements of farm sims in a way I can appreciate but what I enjoy most is how it clearly understands that the people and the community are the things to love in this genre more than a button for jumping over fences (we do love a jump button though).

I've smiled over finding out that Hayden the rancher and Valen the doctor were friends as kids, or Hemlock the bartender remembering the first time he asked his wife Josephine to dance at the fall festival even as I'm spinning in circles wondering who to ask myself. I'm still surprised finding fun new little bits of conversation around town, delighted with even more to unearth in the full release.

For two years I got the classic anime release schedule experience: agonizing over these characters while waiting for the next arc of the story to arrive. Now that the 1.0 version has landed, you get to indulge in a modern binge session, seeing Mistria and its cast all grow in tandem as intended.

Sam Barlow is the director of Half Mermaid and one of interactive fiction's modern luminaries. Breaking into game development with his one-move choose your own adventure Arrival, Barlow worked on games like Ghost Rider and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories before striking out on his own with 2015's Her Story.

Blending FMV-style video with an investigative branching narrative, Her Story was a pioneer in the detective game genre. Since Her Story, Barlow has further experimented with combining live-action footage and interactive fiction in 2019's Telling Lies and 2021's Immortality.

Barlow is currently working on two different projects, one with director Brandon Cronenberg, the other with Blumhouse Productions. But he took a break from those to show me around the mystery-riddled file-stack of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I am trying to find the time to do justice to 868-BACK. I am a huge fan of Michael Brough's work—at this point [they're] the only games I still have and play on my phone, and so I was excited to see him go big with this one and be back on my PC.

I am a big roguelike guy, but also a fan of minimalism and elegance, so the way Brough's games do this 'molecular gastronomy of Rogue' thing, deconstructing the genre to its smaller parts and then refining them to a point where a single mechanic becomes a whole universe is delightful to me. This one has a lot to it though, it's humongous, so I need to step up and prove myself worthy of the full twenty course meal.

The genius and spikiness of the 868 games is that you never feel safe or powerful. Every single move you make could be a disaster. It reminds me of Resident Evil 4 in how I can't play for too long as I find the experience so stressful. But I also need to play a lot to get good! So it is really putting a strain on my body.

Whenever I have a run that goes well and then ends in flames I feel like crap and need to go lie down to recover. It doesn't help that scores in the game can go (really) negative, so it's pretty clear how much it thinks you suck. I want to be as good a player as this game deserves!

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

That would be Warp Interactive's D: The Game. I went down a bit of a Kenji Eno rabbit hole after reading that amazing viral interview between him and Miyamoto and it prompted me to go buy D on steam for a replay. It is in some ways creaky as hell and is not the best and most elegantly or fairly designed point and click game, but that said, it has the juice!

The actual cinematography and vibes are great and once you adjust your mind to how slow things move (every single movement in the game is via a pre-rendered animation from point A to B) it has a pleasant kind of atmosphere. It is still installed because a cool feature of the game is that it only lasts 2 hours and you can't save. If the timer runs out before you complete it, GAME OVER.

The idea was to make you consume it more like a movie than a game. The time limit is fairly reasonable, however when I sat down to play it, I was alt-tabbing to work and multi-task and so whilst I only put in say an hour of game time, my minimised D was still counting and I hit the time limit and was murdered right in the final stretch, so I plan to go back and turn off my distractions and give the game full attention and beat the thing.

RIP Kenji Eno, really one of a kind. The story of how he swapped the gold master discs to slip in content past the censors; and the one about how he announced D2 being a SEGA exclusive on stage at a Sony press conference. He was a wild one.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

If we're allowing ROMS, I never leave a system without a copy of TAITO's 1988 The New Zealand Story—the finest maze game ever made, and one of my all-time favourites (I used to have a Jamma cabinet with an original board in it, but alas had to leave it behind when I crossed the Atlantic).

But if we're sticking to legally above-board digital ownership, it looks like the earliest would be Dragon Wars from Interplay in 1989 over on GOG. I have a lot of games from this period that never get uninstalled because they're pretty small file sizes, but this is one that I always re-install whenever I get a new machine.

It's essentially Bard's Tale 4, but has a slightly more unique setting and was helmed by the legendary Rebecca Heineman. A lot of people have their foundational CRPG and this was mine. It's a gorgeous game, it feels so complete but evokes so much. It uses skill checks like in Wasteland, so you might be imprisoned in the walled city and you see a pile of corpses they're transporting for disposal and you go to the menu and choose to use one of your character's skills, "hide"—and the game responds and you hide in the corpses and get transported out past the guards.

These secret actions that are never signposted, mean[ing] you have to conceive the idea and then go deep into the skill menus, so there's a real delight of having your idea pay off. It's the kind of thing that's very hard to execute in a modern, 3D, real-time simulation.

The game has lots of these moments, and it carries over the feel of open spaces from Bard's Tale's cities, but here expanded over a huge sprawling above ground map. It has such a tone and atmosphere to it. I love this game.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. Over 500 hours of this masterpiece. The game is only a few years old, but I've been a huge fan of this series since the first title was remade on the Nintendo DS and I encountered it for the first time.

It is perhaps the greatest videogame, and certainly in my opinion, the greatest roguelike ever made. The depth of the game systems and the sense of anything being possible is unmatched. Serpentcoil is arguably the best of the lot, with a lot of clever iteration of the interface, and whilst it's easy to lament the loss of the classic pixel art, the variety of locations and enemy types and just the lovely pastoral richness to this world is really lush.

The combination of Japanese mythology and landscapes feels fresh alongside other games' more traditional Tolkien-inspired fantasy tropes. I have completed every dungeon in this game bar one—the harder version of the harder version of the hardest dungeon in the original game that was added in the final round of DLC. I keep trying and failing. But it never stops being delightful and I keep discovering new layers and ways of playing tricks with its systems. Shiren truly is my forever game.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I've already mentioned Shiren the Wanderer, so let's not repeat ourselves. I think the one I have around like a piece of art on my wall is Riven.

Even though the recent full remake was very carefully done, it can't beat the original for me. Such an incredible work of art. The atmosphere and the richness of the visuals, the sound design. At 640x480 it genuinely feels like a real world we're snooping on through our computer screen, the textures and lighting don't feel like CGI, it's hard to see the seams or polygonal edges like you can even in the most expensive modern game.

I always have the game installed and ready to go. Whether that's just so I can wander around my favourite spots or how, every few years, I replay from the start and make little graphs to map out the beautiful open nature of its puzzle flow. One of gaming's true masterpieces.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

Huge fan of Fade In, the screenwriting software. One of my first installs on a fresh PC. It's a marvellous thing. There's a couple of 'industry standard' screenwriting programs— Final Draft and Movie Magic—but it's always been maddening to me that they're so flawed. They charge a fortune for them, and they're feature light and prone to crashing.

So along comes Fade In, made by Kent Tessman, a luminary of the interactive fiction community. It's slicker, faster, crashes less; and has more features! If you think of something to be added, hit up Kent and he's going to work on it.

It also plays nice with a few file formats that we use at Half Mermaid to ingest scripts into our game engine and then back again. We work back-and-forth between our monolithic spreadsheets and Fade In and it all flows pretty effortlessly, helping us just write without getting too stuck on the technical stuff. It's also one of those old-fashioned pieces of software that you buy once and use forever! No monthly subscription malarky here.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Absolute chaos. Some time ago I got into the habit of saving everything to my desktop—all my documents, screengrabs, etc. Because of this I rarely look at the desktop, I'm always opening it up with a few windows left open. But every now and then I jump-scare myself by accidentally hitting the 'show desktop' button and seeing the stack of icons that looks something like the win animation in classic Solitaire meets the 'shunting scene' in the movie Society.

Typical, isn't it? You wait ages for a surprise launch of additional Quake adventures, and then two come along at once. The original game just received an official new episode as part of the shooter's 30^th anniversary celebrations taking place at this year's QuakeCon. But now Raven Software's Quake 4 has got in on the action, as a build of the sequel's cancelled expansion has been discovered and uploaded to GitHub.

Quake 4: Awakening was being developed at Ritual Entertainment—creators of the soon to be remastered SiN and its aborted episodic sequel—but the project was canned by Activision due to underwhelming sales of the base game. The expansion was thought lost to time, until a veteran game developer chanced upon a copy on the hard drive of a second-hand PC he bought.

Said developer is Justin Marshall, a programmer who has worked on games such as The Evil Within, XCOM 2, Dead Island 2, and The Dark Pictures Anthology—and unfortunately is one of the casualties of the industry's massive swathe of layoffs. The discovery of the build appears to have had a profound impact on him.

"I came across this at a very sad point in my life, it was on a hard drive on a vintage computer I bought off Amazon," Marshall explains on the expansion's GitHub page. "Literally this essentially saved my life, I was going through a divorce and just happen[ing] to come across something like this was insane."

While there's an outside chance this is an elaborate prank, everything points to it being legit. A big clue can be found in the config files, some of which are named after then-employees at Ritual, such as legendary Duke Nukem 3D level designer Richard 'Levelord' Grey, and Michael 'RomSteady' Russell, who has discussed the Quake 4 expansion in the past. Speaking to PC Gamer last year, Russell told us that "the expansion pack was 95% done" before Activision pulled the plug.

The far bigger clue, though, is that numerous people have already got the expansion up and running. A no-commentary let's play by Youtuber pagb666 shows the expansion's first three missions, which feature new weapons like a cryo cannon, and a section where the player pilots a mech (because what self-respecting noughties FPS would be complete without a mech sequence?).

While some elements do look unfinished, like a few of the scripted sequences, it does appear that Russell's estimate of how complete the expansion was may be accurate. Marshall says he uploaded the expansion for preservation purposes, and in the hope that "the community can make something cool with it." Given its apparent state, polishing it up to release-level quality may not be beyond the realms of possibility.

The seemingly unstoppable force that is Roblox might not be so unstoppable after all. The company share price has dropped by 70% following the publication of its second-quarter earnings, which show a decline in players and lower-than-expected monetisation.

In an earnings call (via Games Industry) Roblox CFO Naveen Chopra said the company attributed the shortfall to a dearth of "vintage viral games", with players shifting attention to "new and evergreen experiences with lower hourly monetisation". This was exacerbated by changes in Roblox's recommendation algorithm, which Chopra says "optimises for long-term retention" at the expense of "near-term monetisation".

While Roblox still has an enormous audience of 123 million daily players, this number has declined steadily across the previous three quarters from a high of 152 million. Monthly unique players have also fallen by 10 million in the last two quarters, with the number currently at 27 million.

Roblox doesn't expect these winds to change in the near future, either. The company forecasts a year-on-year decline of between 14% and 18% in its third quarter, with Chopra saying that "monetisation weakness is likely to continue." It also opted against providing an earning estimate for the rest of the year, citing "increasing variability" in the fourth quarter.

Chopra conceded that the company's expectations for the year had "changed considerably" but maintained Roblox's "conviction" that it was making the right decisions to secure the platform's future. And of course, this includes the integration of AI into Roblox, which is interesting considering Chopra mentions Roblox's heavy AI investment as part of the reason behind its less than impressive results.

One would like to think that players are leaving Roblox on account of seeing it as a cynical skinner-box designed to squeeze as much money out of its young audience as is possible. That's not to mention the extensive concerns over child safety on the platform, though Roblox has at least made some attempt to address this in recent months.

Devora Wilde has been in loads of videogames. While she's most famous for playing Lae'zel, everyone's hot gith girlfriend in Baldur's Gate 3, she's also been in games like Solasta 2, Clair Obscur, Crimson Desert, Split Fiction, and Red Solstice 2. She's in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 as well—not that she knew about it at the time.

"I started getting comments when the game came out, 'Oh, you're in Space Marine 2!' I was like, 'No, I'm not. What is that?'" Wilde said in an interview with IGN. It was only after someone on Twitter sent her a clip of the performance that she realized it was true. "I had to go through like all my stuff, all my emails, try and match up the codename of the game with the actual game. And then in the end I realized I was in that game."

It's common for actors not to be told the name of games they're working on until the last minute, if at all, for fear of leaks. When Wilde auditioned for a role in Silent Hill 2, in which she ended up performing mocap and stunts, she only twigged what game it was after thinking some of the dialogue sounded familiar then looking it up online.

Wilde played multiple roles in Space Marine 2, including a servo-skull and a Cadian soldier whose messages you find. It was a recording of the latter that convinced her she really was in Space Marine 2. "'I was like, 'Oh, that's me. I'm an audio log.'"

Wilde has been in several Warhammer games and animations. She plays Tzarina Katarin Bokha in Total War: Warhammer 3, provides the Authoritarian voice option for the female Arbitrator in Darktide, and she was one of the Sisters of Battle in the Adepta Sororitas animation Penitence on Warhammer TV. "It just so happens that I've done a lot of Warhammer stuff," Wilde said, "and I never realized how vast the universe is, genuinely."

Slitherine's turn-based 40K strategy game Battlesector launched with a campaign where you could play as the none-more-goth Blood Angels against the bio-horror tyranids. That was followed by DLC adding other playable factions for multiplayer and other modes, leaving players hungry for more singleplayer story campaigns.

With the Deeds of the Fallen DLC earlier this year we finally got our wish—a 12-mission narrative campaign where we got to play as the nuns with guns of the Sisters of Battle, up against the green tide of the orks. It won't be the last, as Slitherine has revealed in an updated roadmap.

Following a free update in October, presumably with more of the balancing patches and quality-of-life updates Battlesector has received since launch, the new narrative DLC is penciled in for "Q4 2026". It's followed by another free update in Q1 of 2027, and then another new faction DLC in Q2.

I've got my fingers crossed for an Astra Militarum campaign, but I'm just happy to see Battlesector continuing to receive new additions. It's been well-supported since launch, with entire new modes Daemonic Incursion, Planetary Supremacy, and the roguelite Crusade mode—which just hit version 1.0—added via updates.

It's well-known that the PC ports of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas were a shemozzle, thanks in part to re-used code across the trio of games, but also a general lack of care that used to be the norm when it came to PC ports. The excellent SilentPatch has long been the solution, and it's now even better thanks to a significant update that not only fixes leftover bugs, but also restores cut content that was inaccessible thanks to typos in the code.

One big change you'll notice with this version of the patch is that 100 voice lines have been restored to GTA San Andreas. Some of these were only bugged in a specific circumstance—like the lines CJ says when shooting at people, which only worked if you played with a controller. Those lines will now trigger when you pull the trigger when aiming with mouse and keyboard.

A lot of other dialogue that would otherwise never be heard has been restored too. Pedestrians will now have conversations about the weather, criminals have lines specifically for running away, CJ has unique lines for taking over specific neighborhoods and more lines when interacting with sex workers, there are more gang taunts, cops now announce when they have you surrounded or need covering fire, there's a grunt specific to being sprayed with paint, and more shopkeepers have lines for when they're being held up. According to the patch notes, "Most notably, the Ammu-Nation vendor had over fifteen voice lines for this event, all previously unused!"

That's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improvements across all three games. Lens flares and heat haze now scale with resolution, NPCs can use sniper rifles and RPGs properly, cops no longer shoot gangsta-style, birds spawn correctly, roadblocks face the right way, and you can put a boat in your garage without crashing the game.

Extremely specific bugs, like the one that turned the sky over San Andreas red at 8 pm if it was raining, have finally been squashed, as well as the one that caused an explosion in Fort Carson by incorrectly spawning a plane in someone's driveway. GTA 3's street gangsters now walk in formation instead of meandering around and then freezing, fixing a problem that affected even the PS2 version.

The list goes on. SilentPatch was already essential to fix more blatant issues like broken mouselook, but now it's even better. If you're in the mood for a replay, here are the setup instructions for all three games.

At this year's QuakeCon in Gaylord, Texas, a number of id Software's OGs and founders are in attendance for a retrospective talk and reunion, and it looks like legendary programmer John Carmack took some time to refamiliarize himself with the reason for the season.

"I sat down to try the Evercade Doom port, and before I knew it, I was on level four, and realizing that I had forgotten where all the keycards were," Carmack wrote on X, "The Everything App." "It wound up taking me 15 minutes each on level four and five. Still a great game after all these years!"

It certainly sounds like Carmack's a little rusty: E1M4 and M5 have par times of 1:30 and 2:45 respectively. I'm always curious to see how developers relate to their own games, especially a Criterion classic like Doom decades down the line. Carmack's fellow John, Romero, is still very much "Knee Deep in the Dead," as it were, creating the Sigil expansions and even giving the one-of-a-kind MyHouse.wad a try on stream.

I've always been slightly shaken by Larian honcho Swen Vincke's admission that he's never revisited Ultima 7⁠—one of his favorite games and primary inspirations⁠—because he knows it wouldn't stand up to his memories from the '90s. In the same conversation, Vincke told me that he spends so much time immersed in and testing Larian's games during development, he hardly touches them after launch.

Couldn't be me: I compulsively replay all my favorites to the point that it's a problem. I have to agree with Carmack: The original Doom really has held up after all these years.

Bethesda is currently running a 40th anniversary sale on Steam until August 13, just in time for this year's QuakeCon. The sale covers the studio's entire catalogue, including the offerings of subsidiaries id and Arkane.

That's where the real heat is, if you ask me: The recently-released Doom: The Dark Ages expansion, Revelations, is on sale for 50% off, 10 bucks to a typical 20. If you've missed out on the main game as well, Dark Ages itself is 67% off, or $23.

It's been a month since Revelation's July 7 release, and it's a beast of a shooter. Former PCG guides writer Rory Norris awarded it a 90% in his review, while staff writer Morgan Park, who was more cold on Dark Ages' base game, argued that Revelations redeems the whole endeavor.

Aside from Revelations, there's bound to be something in here to strike your fancy⁠—it's hard to argue against 10 buck Skyrim, if you somehow don't already have it. I'm a huge Arkane freak, personally, so the studio's whole catalogue for $54 gets a hearty recommendation from me.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is weirdly not discounted in this sale, possibly related to its publishing and copyright situation, but it's also only $10. So taking the plunge on the bundle probably comes out in the wash versus buying things piecemeal.

The sale is an undeniably great opportunity from a customer perspective, but comes at a fraught time for Bethesda. The studio and its subsidiaries were hit hard by Microsoft's "reset" at Xbox: Layoffs at Bethesda Game Studios, Zenimax Online, and id Software, while Arkane is getting spun off with an uncertain future. It also makes me nervous to see a game as good as Revelations get a 50% off discount after just one month⁠—you'd think Bethesda would have protected its value with a more token discount if it was selling really well.

When I open up a trailer for a parkour game, I expect breakbeats or bassy electronica. You know, something radical—Vholume zigs where other games zag, scoring its run 'em up action with dejected, atmospheric synths punctuated by lonely footsteps and effortful grunts. A self-billed "melancholic first-person parkour adventure," it looks like the moody stepchild of Mirror's Edge.

A new trailer for the game dropped last month and revealed it comes out Aug. 21. It provides a sneak peek at the game's overgrown, brutalist jungle gyms and shows off Vholume's multiplayer. According to its Steam page, you can race your buds in real time or compete against their ghosts. It seems ambitious given that just three people are credited as developers on Steam, one of whom you may recognize as one of the Lemaitre Bros. behind Straftat. We called that game 2024's best FPS, and its music is, in fact, radical.

I hear the kids are really into liminality these days, so Vholume's dystopian dream world should appeal to anyone who saw Backrooms and felt like, for the first time in a long time, they were right where they were supposed to be. It also honors the parkour game tradition of being overtly anti-authoritarian, centering a plot where the protagonist has to get "ration tickets" for his family.

A cliche? Maybe, but parkour platforming is kind of the perfect setup for dystopian themes: why bust out of a cage if you're not going to run, jump, and be free? Living in America's contemporary car-centric world, I sometimes long to leap from rooftop to rooftop just so I can be somewhere without filling up on gas. I can't wallrun or strafe jump, though, so videogames will have to do.

And it's a great time for that sort of thing, as there are plenty of other Mirror's Edge-likes on the horizon. If Vholume has piqued your interest, you can try a demo out on its Steam page.

World of Warcraft: Midnight's first season has been… well, a bit of a mixed bag. While the launch-day offerings impressed me, patch content—the major thing that gets remembered in the expansion pack history books—has ranged from rather quite good to downright confusing (I still do not like the Folio).

And, to be fair, Midnight had a ton riding on it. It's the middle child of WoW's ambitious Worldsoul Saga and the first expansion where combat AddOns have been heavily hamstrung. As a consequence, every spec in the game was redesigned in some way. After 20 years of waiting, we even got player housing.

I have not envied Blizzard's position as much as I've raised my eyebrows at its choices, on occasion, and I think it's a marvel that things have pretty much gone fine. I like Prey, I've missed AddOns less than I expected, the remade Silvermoon is downright beautiful, and player housing has knocked it out of the park, bar some microtransaction nonsense.

I recently sat down with several developers from WoW, including lead encounter designers Taylor Sanders and Andrew De Sousa, as well as associate game director Paul Kubit and lead quest designer Rachel Vought, to ask them how they thought Midnight's first season had gone.

Broadly positive, is the answer—with the devs citing Mythic+, solo content such as delves, and Prey as bright spots. Kubit says: "I'm having a great time with season one. I am still this last week rounding out some of my own personal Mythic+ goals, trying to get my numbers as high as possible. But things that have been just a joy for me this first season have been—playing through Delves again, having another season of Delves to explore with a new follower Valeera … and also the addition of Prey alongside it.

"I think that the new feature of Prey, while not technically part of the traditional season, does have some seasonal elements to it, and it sort of played nicely hand-in-hand with how progress went through through delve."

That's something Vought echoes, too: "Having the Prey overlay, just doing outdoor activities, has been like such a delight—because we talk about optimizing the fun out of it, but it's like no, actually, I kind of do want the extra challenge while I'm doing my world quests, and it's a lot of fun."

Though she has been naturally psyched to revisit Silvermoon for the first time since the Burning Crusade, as well: "Going back to Silvermoon and getting to see [it updated], and getting to play through the story and all of that has just been incredible for me as a player. I've also surprisingly been enjoying delves and getting to play local stories, and obviously we're going to get more of those in Curse of Ula'tek as well. Continuing the story, the campaign, and also getting to explore the island."

While, to me, these all track as reasons to be satisfied with the current state of things—after all, I've written positively about them on this site—there's also the other side of the coin, the idea that Blizzard's breakneck pace has given players too much to do without a stern direction: Too many currencies, too many dailies, too many reputations and void assaults and delves. Kubit says:

"We always try to listen to as many players as we can in our game, and we find that—you all as players are not a monolith. You have vastly different play styles and vastly different preferences, and that means that—for as many people as who do feel that strange feeling, like 'there's too much for me, there's too much going on', there's just as many folks who are like 'I wish there was something new happening this week'.

"What we try to do on the reward side and incentive side is make sure that folks who are hungry for lots of new things to do," be it grinding or stacking cute furniture, transmogs and mounts in collections.

And, listen—while I empathise with Kubit here, with MMO audiences being particularly hard to please, I'm not all that sure this works as a simple case of taste. I've played other MMOs that simply give you a wide breadth of things to do, but WoW places a lot of these activities in a package of seasonal pressure. Daily and weekly checklists that will, at some point, become undesirable or even unattainable. The wider systems might be evergreen, but Midnight's also been laden with its fair share of FOMO.

An AddOn-less world

On the encounter design side of things, Sanders and Sousa are both enjoying getting to play in a space where a WeakAuras tech won't be able to code out a solution to everything—allowing them to rely more on memorisation, positioning, and communication-based mechanics.

Sanders tells me: "I think the encounter design team has been learning a lot as we try to design mechanics, in this new paradigm where players have, in many ways, less computational help in terms of the information they're getting in real time, and trying to understand what types of new mechanics players might enjoy in that world.

"You saw us experiment with this a little bit in the L'ura encounter, the final boss of Midnight, with the runes and the symbol mechanic," Sanders is referring to Death's Dirge, here, where L'ura marks players with an order of symbols that have to be struck by a laser in the correct configuration.

"It was fun for me as a designer (and as a player) to see different social groups that I played with, whether it was a pug or my standard raid group, develop different strategies to that. Each group had their own personalized way of handling it … I did hear about a group that had five different people remember the different symbols and repeat them in order. That blows my mind. I can't believe that that worked for a group. A friend of mine told me about that. I'm not sure I believe him."

That same design technique's going to be used for patch 12.1, as well: "We have a couple new places where we're experimenting with this in the Curse of Ula'tek update in the new raid, the Venomous Abyss, and as well in the new delves nemesis boss … You're going to continue to see us explore that a little bit as we try to find new ways to engage players in an AddOn-less world."

Sousa, meanwhile, says that the amount of players trying Mythic+, which has reached new records during Midnight, is also down to the lowered barrier to entry: "That's really affected even our core design for something like dungeons and Mythic+.

"You know, as you're aware, Mythic+ was very, very accessible in Midnight season one. Players are jumping in and really enjoying it. And in a world where we've pulled these things back, our design has allowed for us to emphasize some core skills, and not worry about the delta between folks that have complex add-ons and people that are playing with the base game, so we're seeing people engage a lot deeper as those (perceived or not) requirements have been lifted."

Sanders agrees, saying: "We've seen the package that players felt like they used to need to be able to, baseline, raid or do competitive PvE content shrink or or disappear entirely. So the base UI for the game is better than it's ever been, and we're very excited about continuing to develop that in the future."

Ultimately, the new state of affairs that WoW has laboriously constructed seems to be working for its development team—and while I'm not entirely convinced it's been all sunshine and roses, speaking as someone who has felt the exact opposite in my other MMO of choice, I can't say I prefer it when a developer plays it safe. On balance, I'm still glad WoW's been shaking things up, and I'm keen to see if Blizzard can keep refining its flagship MMO going into Curse of Ula'tek next week.

If you've checked in on Worms creator Andy Davidson sometime in these past few years, you'll know he's been hard at work on Worms: The Director's Cut 1.5, an unofficial but nonetheless Team 17-approved expansion pack for the original strategy-party mashup's Amiga-exclusive sequel. The goods have finally arrived: you can download the whole thing for free now.

It's got over 40 custom levels, 50 new sample packs for your Worms' voices, new teams and terrain types, and so on. It's a collaboration with fan creators and the likes of legendary indie developer Jeff Minter, who was honored via a Llamasoft-themed level in-game. In an interview with Daryl Baxter, Davidson called the expansion a chance to "celebrate the Amiga."

"The expansion pack is a chance for people to enjoy the full package of DC, with all it could do. Rather than closing a chapter, I hope it gives the game a new lease on life," he told Baxter, saying work is underway on a site players can use to share custom levels. "It would be nice for a wider audience to get a chance to play DC. It’s the version of Worms I’m most proud of, as I feel it’s when the gameplay and humour really clicked."

Notably, Director's Cut never made it to modern platforms, but Davidson said in a post on X that the expansion will play nice with emulators if you don't have old hardware lying around. While working with such an old version of Worms—which as you may know, spawned countless sequels and spinoffs all the way through 2025's Apple Arcade-exclusive Worms Across Worlds—was a chance for Davidson to revisit his favorite take on the series, it was also a challenge.

As he told Baxter, "Going back to the original code did prove much more difficult than I imagined. There was a lot I just didn’t remember three decades on, and scrolling through the code I did wonder how I managed it all in the first place!"

A Game of Thrones CRPG is such an obvious licensing fit and yet, culturally and corporately, always appears to be two zigs and a zag away from actually happening.

Perhaps Warhorse Studios was the most likely candidate, in the wake of two unflinching medieval simulations under the Kingdom Come banner. But the Czech studio's owner, Embracer, is also cradling the clumsily named Middle-earth Enterprises, and so Warhorse's future belongs to The Lord of the Rings. As for that other RPG powerhouse, Obsidian? I've seen Josh Sawyer complain too many times from his social media armchair about HBO's unrealistic battle formations to expect that will ever happen.

And so we turn to history, just as George RR has done so many times when sourcing inspiration for his novels. Turn the clock back to 2012 and you'll discover the largely forgotten Game of Thrones—its place in the annals not helped by the fact that Telltale released a game with the exact same name just two years later.

2012's Game of Thrones was a Cyanide production, one of the Parisian developer's long list of eurojanky projects with a fantastical bent. Though today best known for Styx and Blood Bowl—the latter of which manages to be both mechanically and thematically crunchy, down to the bones—the studio was experimenting at the time with CRPGs. In the same year as Game of Thrones came Confrontation, set in the universe of a French tabletop wargame, and Of Orcs and Men, a Styx spinoff in which you played a chunky greenskin.

All three launched to mixed reviews, but it seems to me that Game of Thrones is the pick of the bunch—low-budget and coarsely textured, but elevated by its commitment to weaving a story through the dense fabric of Westeros. This is, I suspect, partly down to the fact that it wasn't conceived as a television tie-in.

Yes, you'll come across the voices and likenesses of HBO actors while pottering around the Gift and King's Landing. A smug rendering of Lena Headey is stinking up the throne room. The Night's Watch is held together by James Cosmo's Commander Mormont. And at a critical moment, you'll benefit from being swept up in the mystery machinations of Conleth Hill's Lord Varys. But otherwise, it's evident that Cyanide's staff had their noses buried deep in the novels.

That's most apparent in the Game of Thrones RPG's structure: you'll flit back and forth between two perspectives, chapter by chapter. It's a common device in fantasy literature, but far less so in our own medium, and has a profound impact on the way the game is experienced. For one thing, you're embodying two different character classes: a fire-flinging priest of R'hllor, who shares his unusual choice of god with the red witch Melisandre, and a brother of the Watch who deals in mace-swings and headbutts.

Cyanide takes full advantage of the split to tell its tale from different angles. While you begin the game battling apparently unconnected plights, the two gradually intersect, and it becomes apparent that your dual protagonists might not share the same interests. The priest loses his titles, and must become a Lannister lapdog if he has any hope of regaining his seat as a lord of the realm. Meanwhile, your man in the north finds himself hunting down lapdogs to protect the Night's Watch from coming apart at the seams. As it turns out, a handful of gold can be all it takes to turn a Brother against his fellows. And the Lannisters are famous for their access to gold.

The action kicks off a month or two before the opening stages of HBO's Game of Thrones, which gives you a front row seat to the events that precipitate war in Westeros. Robert Baratheon is still stumbling around, filling his belly with boars that haven't yet managed to gore him. And Cersei Lannister is busy moving chess pieces around the board. You might not be a pawn, but you certainly play one of her knights, and quickly wind up complicit in dark schemes.

Game adaptations often take place in the margins of their parent properties, and the Game of Thrones RPG might have felt peripheral to the point of triviality. But George RR Martin has always embraced the agency of bit players, expanding rather than reducing the cast of his stories over time, and that spirit allows you to feel part of something bigger here. It helps that Cyanide's storytelling is surprisingly tight for a studio which, up til this point, hadn't been known for narrative. Its dialogue is direct and upfront with its intrigue—a necessary frankness against the backdrop of a world dense with knotted histories. The lead performances, meanwhile, are dripping with theatrical, bassy resonance.

Mind you, a lot of the other voice performances are quite rubbish—presumably recorded by a tiny cast, desperately looking within themselves for a fourth or fifth accent that could feasibly be ascribed to a peasant in Flea Bottom. And I'd be lying if I said the budget couldn't be felt in other ways: the unremarkable streets of a King's Landing that's more Doncaster than Dubrovnik; the repeated visits to nondescript parts of Westeros; the fuzzy aesthetic tricks that developers often used to cover a multitude of fidelity sins during the Xbox 360 era.

But I'm quite fond of an element that was singled out for some of the strongest criticism in reviews of the time: the combat system.

Granted, I grew up on real-time-with-pause brawls. It came in the millennial starter pack with MSN Messenger and a now-defunct AOL email account, so I'm forgiving where others might be frustrated. But if you ask me, Cyanide squeezes real tension out of throwing you into scenarios where you're sweaty and surrounded—desperately trying to tagteam stuns and knockdowns with some temporary companion who unhelpfully spent his youth perfecting archery before joining you shoulder-to-shoulder in a tight dungeon. I even quite like the bits where, as a shapeshifter, you take control of a dog to rip the throats out of unobservant guards, and follow scents to root out betrayal in the Night's Watch.

Like a clutch of dragon eggs, Cyanide's Game of Thrones is a bag of mixed blessings. Sometimes when I'm strolling through Castle Black, I hear that giveaway sign of an underbaked noughties RPG: a supposed old man, speaking with the voice of an overworked 30-year-old voice actor. And in those moments, I wonder whether I might eventually ditch this genre also-ran for good.

But then I remember that one positive quality of noughties RPG fandom was that we accepted imperfection when presented with peculiar mechanics and fascinating worlds. And that, when I look at the far more lavish spectacle fighter Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, launched last year, I see almost nothing of the spirit of George RR Martin. Stories set in Westeros should not be smooth and slick. They should shudder and clunk into place, slowly and then all at once, like the tectonic events they depict. And that is what CRPGs are for.

Smartly Dressed Games, developer of the wildly popular free-to-play zombie survival sim Unturned, has released the game's source code for non-commercial use.

"Unturned's source code and project files are now freely available!" the developers wrote in a Steam post. "Whether you have a new feature or total conversion in mind, the sky's the limit."

The source code is available via GitHub. In an accompanying FAQ, Smartly Dressed Games explained that the reason behind the release is to further support the community's creative efforts.

"Unturned's greatest strength is our passionate community," the studio wrote. "Releasing the source files allows you and other players to further expand upon the game as you see fit, building a lasting legacy for the game regardless of the changes we make or how many years pass."

There are some conditions for players and modders who want to use the source code. In the FAQ, Smartly Dressed Games stressed that uses for the source code "must be strictly non-commercial" and that "players must be able to play and access all features and content of your mod for free." Some elements of code have also been removed from the game because Smartly Dressed Games doesn't have the rights to redistribute it, such as code relating to anti-cheat systems and third-party pathfinding programs.

The developers also note that the source code release does not mean that Unturned itself is open source, as the non-commercial license does not meet the Open Source Initiative's definition of the term. It is something that Smartly Dressed Games would like to do in the future. "Once we finish another game and are hopefully able to re-acquire certain rights, we'd like to re-license the U3 SDK under the MIT License."

Unturned was one of the early products of the post-Minecraft/DayZ survival sim craze. Built by Nelson Sexton when he was still a teenager, it was released into Steam early access in 2014, hitting 1.0 three years later.

Nine years on, and although it's long past its peak, Unturned is still going strong, attracting thousands of players every day. In April, Smartly Dressed Games released a huge update that overhauled the game's California map. Developed over six years, the update increased the size of the map sixfold, added over 100 quests and significantly expanded Unturned's endgame.

Amazon's God of War series has already seen one major recast, with Kratos actor Ryan Hurst having to depart the role after suffering a bicep tear on set. While Hurst has reportedly had surgery and is recovering, the injury was severe enough that production was paused and Amazon has opted to seek out a replacement. Dave Bautista is apparently in talks to replace him.

But Kratos isn't the only character in the TV show who will be seeing a change in actor. Amazon also plans to recast roles of Atreus and Thrud. Unlike Kratos' impromptu recasting, however, the switch for these characters is a planned, creative decision that will take effect from Season 2 onward.

In Season 1, Atreus and Thrud are played by child actors Callum Vinson and Island Austin. But as reported by mp1st, casting calls for Season 2 suggest these characters will be significantly older when that second season rolls around. The casting calls for both characters (who have the codenames 'Joshua' and 'Ruth') to be "Teen" versions, while Joshua's casting call states that in Season 2 Kratos' son "finds his new identity and grows into manhood."

The new casting also implies that Season 2 will roll straight into the events of God of War: Ragnarök rather than splitting the first game into multiple arcs of television. Both seasons are being produced back-to-back, with production originally planned to wrap in April 2027. Whether or not this will be affected by the ongoing hiatus is unclear, as production is not expected to resume until October.

As for who will be playing Kratos instead of Hurst, there are reports Dave Bautista is "in talks" to step into the role. Presumably, Bautista would be more expensive to cast than Hurst. But this is Amazon we're talking about.

At least by the time the God of War show launches, they'll have a third season of material to film. The next game in the series, God of War: Laufey, is due to launch in February next year. Sadly, it isn't coming to PC, as PlayStation has sworn off launching games on the platform for the time being. I'm curious to see how long this lasts, given how much money Sony made by releasing its PlayStation exclusives on PC thus far.

Tencent's ambitious attempt to build a rival to Grand Theft Auto appears to be floundering, as Last Sentinel developer Lightspeed LA has laid off 80 people following the publisher's loss of confidence in the project.

If you're not familiar with Last Sentinel, that would be forgivable. The cyberpunk open world has been in development for six years and was announced at The Game Awards in 2023. But doubts began to circulate about the state of the Last Sentinel after a suite of promotional videos published last year failed to show any footage of the game itself.

Now, as reported by Bloomberg, it appears we'll be lucky to see any of Last Sentinel at all. Following multiple delays and at least one partial project reboot, publisher Tencent has opted not to move forward with the project, and as a result Lightspeed Entertainment has laid off dozens of employees.

As Bloomberg details, Last Sentinel appears to have been in trouble for some time. The game was built as a glossy open-world affair set in a vertical city in a cyberpunk Japan, featuring destructible environments alongside the usual GTA-ish mix of driving and shooting.

However, the game was being built by a much smaller team than Rockstar used for its latter-day open worlds, and according to anonymous sources at Lightspeed, that team had to contend with an unclear vision and a "polarizing" approach to management by former Rockstar San Diego studio director Steve Martin.

After a poor playtest and an unimpressive demonstration to Tencent executives earlier this year, Lightspeed apparently scrambled to assemble an improved version of Last Sentinel. But whatever the team put together apparently wasn't enough, and Tencent has washed its hands of the project.

To be clear, Last Sentinel hasn't been cancelled yet. Lightspeed is still working on the project without Tencent's backing. But the studio is planning to "shift the creative and development direction" of the game "to meet player expectations". Given players were set up to expect a cyberpunk open-world rival to Grand Theft Auto, it's hard to see how Lightspeed can square this given the challenges that lie ahead.

Early on in Big Walk, as you and your pals are scurrying around the world solving puzzles, you might come across a curious sight: a structure near the beach with an oblong prize (here at PC Gamer we call it a nubbin) inside a frosted glass container. Hanging on a hook above it: a sign with some numbers on it. Curious!

You've probably already seen a nubbin in a similar container, which could only be accessed when one of your companions held down a button in a nearby location. But what do these two four-digit numbers mean? And where's the button?

If you're stumped with this numbers puzzle, as we were for a while, we're happy to help.

Since Big Walk is best when you figure puzzles with your friends instead of by reading guides, I'll ease you into the solution to this number puzzle by giving you progressively more explicit hints below. This way you can get some help without completely spoiling the solution, if you like.

Hints

Hint 1:

When you first find this number puzzle, most likely just after you've completed the tutorial puzzles, you won't be able to solve it. It's just that simple. The best advice is to leave it for now and come back to it later, after you've solved five other puzzles and completed the red tower.

Hint 2:

When you're looking around the rest of the world, keep those numbers in mind. Specifically, the format: two four-digit numbers. Maybe you'll see something elsewhere that looks like it's related.

Hint 3:

You'll need a specific item to make sense of those numbers. There are actually two different items that can be individually used to help you with the number puzzle.

Hint 4:

The numbers 4166 and 1899 are coordinates, latitude and longitude, and they point to the button's location on the island.

Hint 5:

There's a map that can be used to find the coordinates, and there's a device that displays its current coordinates on a screen, like a GPS. Either of those can be used to solve the number puzzle.

OK, that's enough hints. Here's the solution:

Solution

First, you can find the map, which requires placing five nubbins on the red tower's roof. The map room will then open up right next to the starting hub, which features a large map on the floor, and a portable, foldable map and compass.

With the map opened in your hands, you can follow the longitude (the numbered lines on the sides) of 41 and the latitude (the numbered lines on the top and bottom) of 18. Where they meet on the map is the grid square to search for the button, which is east and south of the starter hub. The "66" in 4166 refers to a more exact measurement than the map shows, meaning it's about two-thirds of the way south from the top of the grid, and 99 means it's about as far east as you can be in the grid, right along the gridline.

Enlarge the image below by clicking on the arrows on the lower-left corner, if it helps.

That's where to look! You'll find a small button carefully camouflaged behind a rock. Someone will have to hold down the button while another player grabs the nubbin at that puzzle building when the glass container opens, so make sure you've got walkie-talkies with you.

The other way to find the button (and the more fun way, in my opinion) is by using the GPS device. This item will take longer to find than the map: you'll need to visit the green tower, which is in the same area you'll eventually find the button, and just outside it you'll see a red frame holding the GPS (and another sign with more numbers on it).

You can hold the GPS up to friends to show current coordinates, or stick it on someone's backpack.

With one player wearing the GPS on their back, another player can direct them which way to go. Just keep your eyes on the numbers: as you move across the island, the GPS readout will tell you if you're getting closer or further from the location of the button. Happy walking!

Let's be real, come August 27, the Grand Theft Auto 6 "extended look" is not going to be exclusive to Netflix for six hours as advertised. It's going to be exclusive to Netflix for however long it takes for someone to record it and distribute a torrent.

You wouldn't download a car, but would you download an ad for a game about stealing cars?

It would be, I've now had to consider, technically piracy to do so. After all, Netflix probably paid good money for the privilege of being the first to show the world GTA 6 gameplay, although we can only guess, because the financial terms of the deal haven't been disclosed.

Aside from whatever funds exchanged hands, GTA publisher Take-Two's motivation for the deal is to signal that GTA 6 is a cultural event that transcends the gaming scene. And Netflix gets to be associated with that cultural event.

I get Netflix's angle. I don't get Take-Two's, unless the payday was astronomical. Everyone already knows GTA is a big deal, and it's plain disrespectful to GTA fans to turn the gameplay trailer they've been waiting for into a money-making opportunity, especially given that many of them have already pre-ordered the game.

Having to wait six hours to watch a trailer is a relatively minor inconvenience, all things considered, but monetizing a trailer is just tacky. It certainly doesn't reinforce Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's claim that GTA 6 is an "incredible bargain" at $80-$100. It suggests, instead, that we should brace for maximum nickel-and-diming and FOMO exploitation.

I suppose this is how it goes when you don't have to worry about your reputation. There's not much Take-Two and Rockstar could do to hurt GTA 6's sales at this point: They've already sold a zillion pre-orders (or something like that) without any gameplay trailer at all. If there is a line that can't be crossed, it's a couple celestial bodies removed from a tacky gameplay reveal or a new labor scandal.

When the GTA 6 extended look debuts on Netflix on August 27, we'll watch it and report on its contents here, but I imagine a quick scan of social media will allow you to illicitly experience the marketing beat early, if you're the sort of outlaw who dares to watch pirated videogame trailers.

Seasoned FromSoftware investigator Lance McDonald has shared a recently uncovered early internal showcase of Demon's Souls, FromSoft's crucial pivot point between King's Field and Dark Souls, and the progenitor of its own subgenre.

The demonstration consists of a PowerPoint presentation deck and early gameplay trailer. It was shown at "Gameshare 4," an internal Sony event held in May, 2007, almost two years before Demon's Souls' initial release in Japan.

The real highlight is that two minute gameplay showcase, possibly the earliest look we've ever gotten of Demon's Souls in action, with key differences from the final game. First and most striking: There are a few sequences in a first-person camera mode à la King's Field, FromSoft's spiritual predecessor to Souls. It makes for a distinct minority of the footage's runtime, and seems to have been an optional mode you were meant to toggle between.

It also ties into what strikes me as an equally profound, but less immediately grabbing difference: Demon's Souls' early 3D camera was locked behind the player model, which always faced away from the camera⁠—it reminds me of the Jedi Knight games, for a frame of reference.

This would have complimented the first person mode better than the final camera, but it would have also made for a radically different overall experience. The Souls series of today is defined by a camera that can freely rotate around the player and lock onto enemies⁠—it's the bedrock of the games' positioning-based combat.

The demo takes place in an early version of Demon's Souls' tutorial area. The Vanguard Demon is shown in his same arena, practically unchanged compared to the final game⁠—indeed, his moveset and animations have survived all the way to Elden Ring with the Erdtree Avatars.

The Dragon God's arena is open-air in this version, a volcanic crater instead of the magma cavern of the final game. The trailer also features enemies not seen in Demon's Souls' release version: Bipedal snake men resembling the man-serpents of Dark Souls. FromSoft loves revisiting a motif.

There are plenty of interesting nuggets in the PowerPoint as well, read in the video by John Linneman of Digital Foundry. Here's what stood out to me:

• Some striking concept art, including the Flamelurker boss and an open, grassy area with a weird, big hole at the center⁠—the ominous valley and strange rock formations weirdly remind me of the fingerprint ruins from Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.
• FromSoft and Sony clearly felt Demon's Souls' asymmetric multiplayer was its ace in the hole (and/or potentially confusing), and spent a lot of runtime explaining it.
• They presented it as a midpoint between MMOs and pure singleplayer games, joking that it would destroy your life less than the former (complete with a reference to South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft").
• A real "Oh, bless their hearts" development roadmap that predicted completion in June, 2008. Demon's Souls launched in Japan in February '09.
• Repeated references to a "worldwide release," underlining the bad feelings that must have resulted over Sony only publishing Demon's Souls in Japan.

Overall, what was at the time an anodyne bit of internal corporate communication is now an invaluable piece of videogame history. Demon's Souls was a crucial transition game that could have just as easily become a fondly-remembered but little-played cult classic.

It almost didn't make it to America and Europe, and there was no guarantee that it would prove one of the most influential games on the coming decade. Now we understand how close it was to being a very different experience.

Causality Chain is a series at PC Gamer exploring the unlikely links between history, culture, and videogames. And ocassionally hedgehogs.

The arc of history curves in mysterious ways. Beloved actor Keanu Reeves—Ted, Neo, John Wick himself—may not be Buddhist, but he does, in fact, owe the existence of one of his blockbuster roles to the teachings of one of Buddhism's most important figures.

How, you ask? And what exactly does this have to do with videogames? Excellent questions that can only be answered by a causality chain, tracing the butterfly effect of a man walking westward 1,400 years ago to the modern day movie star known for his iconic delivery of the word "Whoa."

Join us, as we tip over the dominoes to link past to present...

The origins of Chinese Buddhism 🔗 Keanu Reeves big dogging Sonic the Hedgehog

The foundational text

620s AD: Around the year 627, Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang begins a 17 year journey from China to India in search of Buddhist texts...

He returns in the year 645 with hundreds of Sanskrit manuscripts, which he will work to translate until his death. One of Xuanzang's disciples writes and publishes a book titled Records of the Western Regions, a dictated account of his pilgrimage.¹

A legendary journey

1590s: Xuanzang's account inspires 1,000 years of folktales, both written and in the oral tradition. In the late 16th century, a fictional account of the journey of Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang and the monkey king Sun Wukong is published under the name Journey to the West.²

From the west to the east

1984: Manga artist Akira Toriyama decides to follow up his hit comic Dr. Slump, which was set in a vague satirical version of America, with a new series that has "Chinese scenery" instead.³

Toriyama uses Journey to the West as the template, saying in a 1995 interview "I thought it would be easy if that story served as the basis, since all I would have to do would be to arrange things." His protagonist Son Goku is modeled after the Monkey King.

The Super moment

1991: After Dragon Ball becomes increasingly popular as a battle manga, Toriyama gives Goku a power-up called Super Saiyan. He draws Super Saiyan Goku with a golden aura and blonde hair instead of black so that his assistant can spend less time inking Goku's hair each issue.⁴

Sonic's power-up looks mighty familiar

1992: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 debuts in November the following year. When he powers up by collecting the Chaos Emeralds, Sonic glows gold and transforms into Super Sonic.

Coincidence?? No.⁵

Sonic needs a shadow

2001: To give Sonic a more powerful rival, Sonic Team creates Shadow the Hedgehog, the "ultimate lifeform." He canonically approves of stealing candy from babies⁶, and is also maybe Vegeta.⁷

Keanu is the ultimate life form?

2024: After being cast as the voice of Shadow, Keanu Reeves looks an interviewer dead in the eyes and declares that he, either as a human man or the voice of a CGI hedgehog, can beat up Sonic the Hedgehog.⁸

Sources and further reading

1. Xuanzang, Wikipedia
2. How to understand Journey to the West, Stone Bridge Press
3. Akira Toriyama Super Interview, Kanzenshuu
4. The Truth About the “Dragon Ball” Manga, Kanzenshuu
5. Sonic the Hedgehog & Dragon Ball – Influences and Inspiration, Zed's Writings
6. Shadow the Hedgehog - This is like taking candy from a baby, YouTube
7. Iizuka says Shadow the Hedgehog wasn't inspired by Vegeta, but fans have receipts that say otherwise, PC Gamer
8. Keanu Reeves Talks Voicing Shadow, YouTube

Read more on PC Gamer

• Black Myth: Wukong's care and attention to its setting made it one of my favorite gaming experiences of 2024
• Enslaved was a one-of-a-kind post-apocalyptic epic
• Keanu Reeves went on an intense 'internal journey' to inhabit the role of evil Sonic the Hedgehog With a Gun

Mark Darrah was a programmer on the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, along with Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire, and served as executive producer of the Dragon Age series from Origins through Inquisition before leaving in 2020—and coming back in 2023 to kick in on The Veilguard. He knows a thing or two about BioWare RPGs, in other words, and speaking to FRVR he said he also knows why Baldur's Gate 3 was such a great sequel—so great that it has overshadowed the games that came before it, made mounts of money, and is still among the most popular games on Steam three years after release.

Darrah reckons that's a direct result of Larian's willingness to do its own thing with the sequel. Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity "feels like an Infinity Engine game," Darrah said (and he's 100% correct on that), and they're great, but Darrah says that's also a very limiting factor: "The reality is that the industry has moved on so much since then that I was like, oh yeah, this is a really faithful adaptation of that and it turns out that I didn’t actually want that anymore."

Larian, on the other hand, "are Baldur’s Gate 2 and Baldur’s Gate 1-flavoured, but they’re also Divine Divinity-flavoured. They are flavoured by their own track record, they are flavoured by what CRPGs have become in the intervening 20 years. So I think it’s a great sequel. I think they did what is the right thing to do given that large of a gap."

Baldur's Gate 3 really is more akin to Larian's Divinity games than its namesakes, and those Divinity games are brilliant RPGs too. Original Sin 2 took our Game of the Year crown in 2017: PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon said at the time that "there's never been an RPG with a story or characters this interesting that you can play co-op with four players," which is also a pretty spot-on description of Baldur's Gate 3.

The problem for Baldur's Gate owner Hasbro is that Larian's work was maybe a little too great: The company now finds itself in possession of a massively lucrative videogame property that nobody wants to touch because, basically, who wants to go on after The Beatles? Darrah has thoughts on that too—basically, do a Fallout: New Vegas with it.

"Get Larian to agree to license out the Divinity Engine and essentially let someone make an oversized expansion pack for Baldur’s Gate 3 and call that Baldur’s Gate 4," Darrah said. "That could work."

Conversely, it could take the approach suggested by PC Gamer editor Fraser Brown: Just don't.

After letting the speculation machine run wild for months, Take-Two announced in June that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch with an $80 price tag for the basic, missing-some-stuff edition. That's a lot of money, especially when you consider that most people will feel compelled to lay out the extra $20 for the Ultimate Edition, which promises "an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel, and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story." But Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reckons it's actually a heck of a deal for what you're getting.

Asked about the $80 price point for GTA 6—and the decision to leave NBA 2K27 at $70—during today's investors call, Zelnick repeated a point he's made previously: That Take-Two aims to "deliver way more value to consumers than what we charge them."

"The real cost of a triple-A videogame is a whole lot lower today than it was 20 years ago. Pricing has not kept pace with inflation," Zelnick said. "And our goal is to continue to overdeliver for our consumers because how you feel about any experience is the intersection of the experience itself and what you paid for it.

"To say that we expect that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be an incredible bargain as experiences go is a gross understatement, because Rockstar Games is known for overdelivering."

Not every game is Grand Theft Auto 6, a point made earlier this year by Bank of America securities analyst Omar Dessouky, who warned that if Take-Two didn't increase the GTA 6 price, the industry as a whole would probably be stuck at the $70 price point for years to come. So while GTA 6 will launch at the increased price point, Zelnick said not all Take Two's games will.

"Our goal is not to maximize price," Zelnick said. "So in this case, I think what we’ve decided to do makes a whole lot of sense in the context of what we’re delivering, and that’s the lens through which we’ll look going forward as well."

Grand Theft Auto 6 remains scheduled for release, on consoles, on November 19. We'll get our first look at gameplay on August 27, at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET on Netflix, and then six hours later on YouTube.

During Take-Two's latest earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said the current computing hardware crisis—you know, the one that's making it more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia's QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online—is, to quote the man directly, "not a good thing."

But while the skyrocketing costs of consoles and components are threatening to price customers out of the pastime, Zelnick said Take-Two doesn't see increasingly inaccessible gaming hardware as an insurmountable problem. In part, that's because Rockstar's parent company expects a lot more of us will be streaming games in the near future.

The "advent of streaming," Zelnick said, is something that Take-Two believes is "right around the corner, in terms of having something that's low latency and really works well for consumers. Machines that weren't game machines before will become game machines."

As a result, the company imagines its customer base will continue to grow as cloud gaming becomes standardized, regardless of what happens to the traditional gaming hardware market.

That's "if you believe in streaming," Zelnick said, "and to be clear, we really do. And I'm happy to put a timeline on it. I think we'll be in commercial streaming mode within three years."

By Zelnick's estimate, broader adoption of cloud gaming could effectively increase Take-Two's potential user base tenfold. That wouldn't necessarily produce a tenfold increase in revenue, he said, as the company's most "avid" customers are those who already have traditional gaming hardware. But game streaming "creates great opportunity for titles that are broadly desirable, even outside of core markets."

Some amount of Zelnick's vision of a glorious and lucrative game streaming future is believable: It's easy to imagine that there's a number of people out there who might, for instance, be interested in playing Take-Two games like GTA 6 even if they aren't otherwise compelled to invest in a gaming setup—especially as the cost of building one continues to rise.

But for streaming to become a more common standard in gaming, it'll need to overcome profound—and intensifying—anxieties about game and media ownership. From the Stop Killing Games effort to the outcry provoked by Sony's announcing an end of disc production, there's a justifiable unease among consumers about being left with no way to access games outside of streaming and subscription services that can be shuttered as soon as they stop generating the requisite revenue figures.

Even Hideo Kojima's in his feelings about it, recently sharing his fears that "we will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved." While Zelnick was bullish about digital media distribution elsewhere in this week's earnings call, it's worth noting that he previously went on record in 2020 as being "highly skeptical that subscriptions will be the only way or primary way that interactive entertainment is distributed."

In time, however, we might validate the prediction of Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay, who said in 2024 that gamers would get "comfortable with not owning your game." If the hardware cost crisis continues to worsen, we might not have a choice.

Fantastic new puzzle game Big Walk drew some early complaints over the volume of its proximity voice chat, which was too quiet for some players and mic setups, and developer House House has now released a patch that it hopes will resolve the issue while respecting the spirit of the game.

The studio has a fine line to walk, because Big Walk's primary source of friction is the challenge of communicating over distances. Voices don't carry very far, so players often have to communicate with radios, arm signals (or frantic arm waving), notes, and signs to coordinate exploration and solve puzzles.

House House says that, with the new patch, Big Walk "now does a much better job of bringing players with quiet microphone setups up to the intended volume." The change does not, however, increase the distance that voices carry or introduce the option to adjust the voice and background audio levels separately.

"This change makes quiet voices louder overall, so you will be louder up close, and louder at a medium distance," writes the studio. "If you were affected by the issue, you'll probably find talking at a medium distance much more comfortable now.

"However we have not changed the distance at which voices drop off. We consider it an important part of the game's design that you can only hear players who are close to you. This distance is quite specific and shapes the dynamics of the game, the same way that a character's jump height might be very specific in a platforming game."

The developer may consider future changes if feedback warrants it, but says it considers today's patch the "single most important fix regarding voice volume," and will take its time determining whether to pursue further changes.

"We are a very small team, and we want to make sure we get each change right, so we will need to take things one step at a time," the studio said.

We don't have a scored review of Big Walk yet, but will soon—here's Morgan's take on it as of a dozen or so puzzles ago. The short version is that it's a lot of fun.

I haven't encountered issues with the voice volume myself, though it did take me a while to adapt to Big Walk's rapid volume falloff. If you and another player wouldn't be able to hold a casual conversation in real life—say, because you're 25 feet apart on a beach—you probably won't be able to hear each other clearly in Big Walk.

It seems that the government of Japan is not happy with the US government's habit of using images from Japanese videogames in its political rhetoric, which has included racist, war-mongering social media posts. A Mainichi Shimbun report (Google translated, via IGN) says Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has "repeatedly expressed concerns" about the use of such images, both because it doesn't have permission to use them as well as the potential damage to globally recognized brands like Mario and Pokémon.

Various US government agencies began posting memes to promote various policies in 2025. In September, for instance, Homeland Security posted a montage of immigration raids and arrests interspersed with video clips and music from the Pokémon animated series; Customs and Border Patrol followed with a video of dancing Pikachu as "Border Patrols' newest recruit."

The Pokémon Company said at the time that the use of its property in those promos was unauthorized, but DHS made clear that it didn't care, and that it had no intention of stopping. The Pokémon Company was marginally more critical in March of this year, saying "our mission is to bring the world together, and that mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda."

In April, Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan's Foreign Affairs Minister, criticized a White House tweet using Wii Sports footage to promote US attacks on Iran, although as with previous incidents, his complaint was focused on the violation of copyright law rather than the odious nature of the post itself. Still, it's at least stronger than Microsoft's complete non-response to the White House using Halo images in a call to "destroy" immigration.

That makes the more recent Foreign Affairs Ministry's complaints notable: Rather than simply muttering "they shouldn't do that" while handwaving at IP law, the report says the Ministry has specifically asked the Trump Administration to stop posting memes using these characters multiple times. Copyright law is still a concern: The ministry said that "even public institutions require permission from the creator when using intellectual property." But it also reportedly cited the potential damage being done to their related brands by their use for political purposes.

Whether the Trump administration or other US government agencies will comply with the request remains to be seen. I've reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and the White House for comment, and will update if I receive a reply.

Take-Two Interactive chief Strauss Zelnick has waded into the discs vs. digital debate, and given the company's decision to release Grand Theft Auto 6 exclusively in digital format, you probably won't be surprised to find that he thinks discs "don't really make sense" these days.

PC gamers have lived in an almost fully digital world for years, thanks primarily to the rise of Steam, but it's different on the console side of things, where physical game releases, and retailers like GameStop, are still a regular part of life. But two things have shaken that foundation recently: The lack of a physical edition of GTA 6—a game so big it really does have the potential for that kind of industry-wide impact—and Sony's decision to end disc production in 2028.

That's got some console gamers a little shook, but Zelnick doesn't think it's going to matter much because the digital revolution has mostly already happened anyway. "Our business is well over 90% digitally distributed as it is. It’s already a digital business," he said in today's earnings call. "So in certain instances, especially if it’s a big game, discs—and note I said discs—don’t really make sense for the consumer.

"Also, most instances you have to register online to play anyhow. So if you’re already connected, who cares if you download digitally? It’s all the same and it’s much more convenient."

Zelnick is correct, mostly, that digital distribution is more convenient, as long as you have access to the necessary online infrastructure—which is to say, internet that doesn't suck. Certainly the world is better on that front than it was 20 years ago, but there are just as certainly still people for whom downloading tens or hundreds of gigabytes is absolutely not convenient.

Beyond that, there's also the ineffable magic of game boxes, and the way they make games "real" in ways that downloading from Steam or GOG simply cannot duplicate. Some of us just love those big dumb game boxes that eat up so much space on shelves, and a not-insignificant sense of the excitement around gaming is lost when everything is reduced to an intangible clot of data.

All of that is without getting into the whole question of "ownership," and I'm sorry to say it but for as mad as we all got at that guy from Ubisoft who said we need to get comfortable with the idea of not owning our games, he was right.

Anyway, none of that represents the mainstream gaming audience, and there's no uncrossing this particular Rubicon. But Zelnick said the embrace of digital doesn't mean Take-Two is abandoning physical releases completely: Comparing it to the persistence of vinyl in the music business, he said that Take-Two will likely put out physical editions of games "now and then." But, he continued, "in other instances, it just won't make sense."

Zelnick isn't the only one in the industry who thinks the move away from game discs on consoles won't ultimately be a big deal. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in July that "there are pluses and minuses, but we think it will not disturb the industry too much," while industry analyst Daniel Ahmad more directly echoed Zelnick's point, saying "the truth is that the console ecosystem is nearly entirely digital at this point" anyway.

Grand Theft Auto 6, for the record, remains set for release on November 19, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. A PC version still hasn't been announced.

Back in 2018, Blizzard revealed something very funny about its iconic mech hero D.Va: Everything about her is a mess under the hood.

Game director Aaron Keller likened the way D.Va is programmed to a "plate of spaghetti," when speaking to Kotaku at the time. When she ditches her mech, she's actually transitioning into a separate hero as far as the game understands it, and this led to lots of weird problems and even weirder bugs.

That won't be a problem with D.mon, the newest mech hero to join Overwatch, lead hero producer Kenny Hudson explained in a recent group interview with PC Gamer. D.mon is "actually one entity," he said, even though she can be separated from her mech just like D.Va.

"Took a little bit of work, definitely doubled the animations and stuff like that," he added. "But overall, [it] makes the experience of making D.Mon a lot easier and fixing D.Mon and providing assets for D.Mon down the road a lot easier for the rest of the team."

That's good news because I think D.Mon will draw a lot of players over to the tank role when she debuts in season 4 next week. Hudson provided a brief demo of her kit built around an energy sword and shield. D.Mon is sort of like the sequel to Reinhardt, holding the frontline and boosting straight into her targets.

As the leader of MEKA Squad, a group of Korean mech pilots that includes D.Va, D.Mon is much sturdier than her Overwatch elder, who zips around the battlefield like a bee. D.Mon is anchored to the ground, but she can still dash in any direction using a limited fuel resource. Her shoulder has a mounted machine gun that can be used long-range before she's close enough to take out her shield. With the shield up, she basically becomes a slightly faster Reinhardt with a bonus charge ability to knock enemies back (or off ledges).

Her ultimate, Limit Break, will probably be the reason to play her (or ban her). She does a big whirlwind slash with the sword, tearing open a weakness on every hit so that enemies take increased damage. It also gives her a huge chunk of overhealth. Hudson said she's dangerous in team compositions that can trample over enemies fast and pairs nicely with any damage-dealing heroes who can quickly capitalize on her ult's debuff.

My favorite part about D.Mon only happens when she's been knocked out of the mech with nothing but her mech's machine gun. In addition to knocking enemies back when she calls down her mech, you get to see the arms and legs fly in and lock together like an episode of Voltron. The whole animation is slick and now has me eager to see if Blizzard will one day surprise us with more members of MEKA Squad.

D.Mon will touchdown with season 4 on August 11.

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls has been highly anticipated for some time and that's partly because it's from Arc System Works, the company behind the likes of Guilty Gear, Blazblue, and Persona 4 Arena. Yet Steam users are disappointed in its opening few days. That's because despite many praising the game itself, it reportedly has a litany of tech issues.

The game currently sits at a 'Mixed' (56% negative) rating on Steam with almost 1,600 reviews, and it appears to have around 10,000 concurrent players on SteamDB at the time of writing. Considering it's a $60 game, that's a pretty sizable number of people.

One of the top-rated negative reviews right now complains that they're getting 45 fps on the game, where they get significantly more on Tekken and Street Fighter. This would be the perfect chance to use the fairly new system for adding PC specs into Steam reviews, but alas, the user leaves none. Still, good performance is necessary for fighting games that rely heavily on reading moves and responding as fast as possible. Another popular negative review says, "either the netcode or the poor performance makes the online play very bad, with rollback spikes."

A user on the r/games subreddit echoes this same frustration with performance, saying "The CPU utilisation in this game is straight up bonkers. It tapers off a little bit after the tutorial, but there is no reason why this shouldn't be able to run on lower-end rigs."

This is all after the devs vowed to fix performance issues for launch day, at the end of July.

With its anti-cheat system (Kernel Level Easy Anti-Cheat), one Steam review says the game is "aggressively hostile to Linux players for absolutely no reason". It notes that, even though previous Arc System Works games with Easy Anti-Cheat work on Linux (like Dragon Ball FighterZ), Fighting Souls simply refuses to play.

The final common critique is that Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls forces users to sign in with a PSN login. This same critique hit Helldivers 2 back in May, 2024, when Sony added the login requirement months after the game's launch. In fairness, part of the anger around the Helldivers 2 update was that players who already bought the game, played it, and could potentially struggle to refund it felt like they had been tricked into making or maintaining an account for a console they don't even use.

Still, early player figures seem fairly strong, getting two-thirds of the peak concurrent players of the Fighting Souls Open Beta. That peak concurrent figure places it just below Dragon Ball Fighter Z and Guilty Gear Strive for opening day, and the weekend could shift those figures too. SteamDB tell an incomplete picture, so take those figures with a grain of salt, but there are enough players complaining that Arc System Works is likely very aware of what the mixed rating is all about.

Here's hoping we see fixes in the coming weeks, as it seems like a solid game. We even said it "has the sauce" just a few weeks ago, so it would be a shame to see that sauce go rotten for reasons beyond its gameplay.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 2026 is a fantastic 16-inch gaming laptop. There you go, review over, we can all go home. But wait, because it's got a serious flaw that should make you hold your fire before pressing the order button. And that flaw, as those familiar with the ongoing memory crisis may have already guessed, is the price.

Asus has sent me a 64 GB DDR5, RTX 5080-equipped machine for testing, and the same-specced model is currently listed for an astonishing $4,800. Cheaper models with more reasonable amounts of RAM are available—but even the 32 GB, 1 TB version is currently listed at Best Buy for $4,400.

I'm sorry, but that's simply too much to pay for an RTX 5080 gaming laptop. Even one as lovely as this. Particularly as the phenomenal Razer Blade 16 (2026) in RTX 5080 trim is $400 cheaper, with the same Intel Panther Lake-based chip.

If you can find the new G16 for the same money as the Razer Blade 16 during the sales, the choice becomes a lot more difficult. The Asus machine is a worthy competitor, what with its excellent chassis design, stunning 240 Hz OLED display, and superb portability. It's a gaming laptop I've enjoyed testing, particularly as it's capable of knocking the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ for six in certain gaming benchmarks.

Better still, it's got excellent battery life. This is a machine I would happily take on the road with me, gaming in bliss as I go. But when it's this expensive, I can't give it the wholehearted recommendation my heart desires.

Money matters, and when the G16 is listed for such teeth-chattering prices, I have to dock some precious points off the score.

The memory crisis has affected gaming laptops particularly badly in recent months—and by the looks of things, it's not going to get better any time soon. My hope for the G16 is that the sales periods will bring it down to more reasonable figures, in which case you'll find me shouting its virtues from the nearest rooftop. But as things currently stand? It's simply too pricey to gain a top spot.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) features

The new Zephyrus G16 looks much the same as the old model, but under the hood it's had some significant tweaks. The largest of which is the addition of a Panther Lake-based Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor, the same as you'll find in the new Razer Blade 16.

It's a 16-core chip, breaking down into four Performance cores, eight Efficient, and four Low Power Efficient beasties. As with the new Blade, that core loadout might seem a little underpowered at first, but the Core Ultra 9 386H makes a compelling case for itself as a powerful gaming CPU tucked inside a slim laptop frame.

My particular review sample comes with a ludicrous 64 GB of LPDDR5X-8533, paired with a… 1 TB SSD. I'm not sure who'd spec out a G16 this way, as I'd much rather have half the RAM and double the storage space, which is more traditional for a high-powered gaming lappy. Still, that's what Asus sent me, so that's what I'll be testing.

The 2026 G16 comes in many flavours, with up to an RTX 5090 crammed within its aluminium chassis. This one's got an RTX 5080 mobile, with a raised TGP of 135 W compared to the older model's 120 W limit. It can be pushed all the way up to 160 W in Manual mode within the Asus Armory Crate software—but I've mostly tested it at 135 W in Turbo mode, as your average user isn't likely to dive too far into the manual settings.

That being said, on paper, it's an impressive max power limit for such a slim and sleek machine.

Asus has made a few tweaks to the keyboard, too. The deck has been reinforced to prevent flex, and the keycaps now have an anti-fingerprint coating, which feels rather grippy underneath my fingertips.

The hinge also uses two torsion springs to make it easier to lift, which is a nice touch. It's full of little bits of refinement, sprinkled on top of what was already an excellent design.

The 240 Hz OLED panel has also received some attention, as it now features a peak brightness rating of 1100 nits and VESA TrueBlack 1000 HDR certification. It's a sumptuous 1600p display, and a rival to the Blade 16's similarly-specced screen.

Overall, the G16 looks and feels near-identical to the old model when you pass it around in your hands. It's still got a large slash of tasteful LED lights on the lid, it's still one of the best-looking (and feeling) super-portable 16-inch gaming laptops you can buy, and this new version has received some tasty hardware upgrades. A strong start, I would say.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 performance

At 1080p, the new G16 puts on a good showing against the other RTX 5080-equipped, slim-as-you-like gaming machines in my charts—although the much chonkier Legion Pro 7i looms menacingly at the bottom.

Still, the fresh-faced Asus lappy is often significantly faster than the old model. This becomes obvious in our CPU-heavy Baldur's Gate 3 test, where the new Panther Lake chip beats the older Core Ultra 9 285 H quite handily.

1080p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1080p resolution

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1080p High)F1 24 (1080p Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

52

39

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

50

44

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

55

32

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

66

44

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

68

38

020406080

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	52 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	50 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	55 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	66 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	68 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

78

43

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

69

41

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

68

39

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

83

41

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

96

55

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	78 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	69 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	68 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	83 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	96 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

102

83

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

88

64

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

73

47

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

110

84

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

99

84

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	102 Avg FPS, 83 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	88 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	73 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	110 Avg FPS, 84 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	99 Avg FPS, 84 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

101

76

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

93

60

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

100

50

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

120

92

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

126

51

037.575112.5150

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	101 Avg FPS, 76 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	93 Avg FPS, 60 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	100 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	120 Avg FPS, 92 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	126 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

102

53

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

94

50

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

102

42

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

126

64

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

140

72

037.575112.5150

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	102 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	94 Avg FPS, 50 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	102 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	126 Avg FPS, 64 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	140 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS

The 2026 version of the G16 handily beats its predecessor in every benchmark at 1080p, and often beats the similarly-specced MSI Stealth 16 AI+ to boot. The much-chonkier Lenovo, however, wins the day overall.

It also scorches ahead in Black Myth Wukong, beating the new, similarly-specced MSI Stealth 16 AI+ by a massive 29 frames. In fact, it's only eight frames behind the new RTX 5090-equipped Razer Blade 16. Admittedly, the G16 still gets mopped up by the Razer in many of my other benches, but still. Small wins for the 135 W RTX 5080 mobile, and all that.

1600p gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p resolution

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (Native res. High)F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

31

24

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

28

21

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

34

22

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

39

30

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

40

28

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	31 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	28 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	34 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	39 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	40 Avg FPS, 28 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

80

46

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

66

36

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

67

39

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

81

45

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

96

42

0255075100

Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	80 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	66 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	67 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	81 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	96 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

75

66

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

76

55

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

57

49

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

76

48

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

111

80

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong (Native res. High) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	75 Avg FPS, 66 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	76 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	57 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	76 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	111 Avg FPS, 80 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

63

53

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

57

44

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

62

43

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

78

67

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

77

55

020406080

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	63 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	57 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	62 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	78 Avg FPS, 67 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	77 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

68

46

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

68

41

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

74

48

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

95

56

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

96

65

0255075100

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	68 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	68 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	74 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	95 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	96 Avg FPS, 65 1% Low FPS

At 1600p, the 2025 G16 catches back up to its younger sibling in several of my tests. We're now out of CPU limited territory and into a zone where the GPUs can more freely compete, and as a result the mere 15 W difference between the two Asus machines means they track fairly closely. Apart from BG3, of course, which still takes all the CPU grunt you can throw at it.

The MSI Stealth, however, finds a sudden burst of speed in the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition benchmark, jumping ahead of both G16s by a full six frames in the averages. It's still way off the pace in Black Myth, though, albeit slightly ahead in Cyberpunk 2077.

And yes, it's time to talk about those two beasts lurking at the bottom. Our Razer Blade 16 sample might be an RTX 5090-equipped monster, but it's worth mentioning that it's available for the same cash as this particular spec at the time of writing. It's got the G16 firmly licked in three of my benchmarks, although pulls roughly level in the averages in BG3 and Black Myth.

And then there's the rocketship that is the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10. It's not a slim model, and it's got pretty awful battery life, as we'll see in the charts later. But I've thrown it in as an example of what a much less portable, full-fat gaming laptop can do when pushed to the limit. Dare I point out it's significantly cheaper, too? Food for thought.

Real-world gaming performance

This chart shows average and 1% low frame rate results in various tested games at 1600p resolution with Quality upscaling enabled, and frame gen. where applicable

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + Quality upscaling, 2x FG)Black Myth: Wukong (Native res. High + Quality upscaling)F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + Quality upscaling, 2x FG)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

95

79

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

85

48

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

97

53

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

112

75

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

124

83

037.575112.5150

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + Quality upscaling, 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	95 Avg FPS, 79 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	85 Avg FPS, 48 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	97 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	112 Avg FPS, 75 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	124 Avg FPS, 83 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

84

72

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

76

55

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

87

74

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

98

59

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

111

80

037.575112.5150

Black Myth: Wukong (Native res. High + Quality upscaling) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	84 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	76 Avg FPS, 55 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	87 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	98 Avg FPS, 59 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	111 Avg FPS, 80 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

144

125

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

130

66

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

147

56

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

185

103

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

184

91

050100150200

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + Quality upscaling, 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	144 Avg FPS, 125 1% Low FPS
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	130 Avg FPS, 66 1% Low FPS
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	147 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	185 Avg FPS, 103 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	184 Avg FPS, 91 1% Low FPS

Interestingly, with upscaling enabled, the MSI Stealth 16 AI+ inches ahead of the new G16 by a few frames on average. It's still miles off the pace of the Razer and Lenovo machines, though.

Turn on the upscaling (and frame gen, in certain benches) and something rather interesting happens. The MSI Stealth 16 AI+, a lappy that's performed rather inconsistently across our gaming tests up until now, suddenly comes out on top versus the other lightweight RTX 5080 machines—at least when it comes to average frame rate.

It's not by a whole lot when compared to the new G16, and the MSI's 1% lows are often all over the place, but still. Not too shabby. And yes, the Blade 16 and the Lenovo rule the charts once more.

The Razer lappy stomps ahead by 15 frames on average in Cyberpunk, but the Lenovo goes another 12 frames further than that. It's a shame it's harder to shove one in your shoulder bag, isn't it?

Overall, it's a fairly impressive set of gaming results for the new G16. However, the price of this particular model keeps ringing in my ears. Yes, it's got 64 GB of RAM, and yes, the 32 GB version is $400 cheaper. But squaring these prices relative to the performance? It's a lot of cash for these sorts of frame rates, even if the portability factor is off the charts.

CPU performance

CPU performance figures taken from the Cinebench R24 single-core and multi-core benchmarks

Cinebench 2024

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

1215

124

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

1171

125

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

1221

124

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

1200

124

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

2039

138

07501,5002,2503,000

Cinebench 2024 Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	1215 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	1171 Multi-core index score, 125 Single-core index score
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	1221 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	1200 Multi-core index score, 124 Single-core index score
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	2039 Multi-core index score, 138 Single-core index score

The 2026 Asus G16, MSI Stealth 16 AI+, and the Razer Blade 16 all have the same CPU, and it's pleasing to see how closely they track with each other. The mighty 24-core chip in the Lenovo, however, flexes its muscles once more.

Hey, look at all those near-as-makes-no-difference Cinebench figures. All the Core Ultra 386H chips perform almost identically here, although the elder Core Ultra 9 285H in last year's G16 creeps ahead by a single point in the single-core scores, and drops slightly behind in the multi-core index figures.

Cinebench R24 can be a little twitchy, so I reckon if I ran all our Panther Lake machines through these benchmarks hundreds of times, you'd see them trade places by small amounts. One thing I would bet on, though, is that the 24-core Arrow Lake chip found in the Legion Pro 7i would beat them all no matter what.

Again, what we're seeing here is the difference between a chonky gaming laptop, and an ultra-portable machine. Larger chassis designs mean better airflow, and that means more thermal capacity for fire-breathing, ultra-fast components.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 thermals

One of my major issues with the 2025 version of the Asus G16 is the fan noise. That might sound slightly odd, as all gaming laptops can make a racket when pushed to their limits; however, the old G16 liked to spin up its fans at a moment's notice. Then spin them down again. Then back up. Then… you get the idea.

There was also a high-pitched, whiney note that sang out over the top of all the whooshing air, which proved rather irritating over a full working day. Thankfully, the 2026 G16 has no such issues, which makes it much more civilised to live with. It still sounds like a hairdryer in Turbo mode, but again, pretty much all gaming laptops do.

Real-world gaming temperatures

Gaming temperature results recorded during multiple Metro Exodus EE runs

Gaming temperatures

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

72

98

69

77

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

74

81

68

72

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

92

100

81

87

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

82

98

62

77

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

94

105

74

79

037.575112.5150

Gaming temperatures Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	72 Avg CPU (°C), 98 Max CPU (°C), 69 Avg GPU (°C), 77 Max GPU (°C)
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	74 Avg CPU (°C), 81 Max CPU (°C), 68 Avg GPU (°C), 72 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	92 Avg CPU (°C), 100 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 87 Max GPU (°C)
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	82 Avg CPU (°C), 98 Max CPU (°C), 62 Avg GPU (°C), 77 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	94 Avg CPU (°C), 105 Max CPU (°C), 74 Avg GPU (°C), 79 Max GPU (°C)

The new G16 is great at keeping its GPU cool, although the Panther Lake CPUs in each of our Core Ultra 9 386H machines like to run hot. The big Arrow Lake chip in the Lenovo is the toastiest of them all, though.

Not only is the G16 much quieter during day-to-day usage, but it's pretty good at keeping its GPU cool during gaming. The Core Ultra 9 386H, however, likes to run fairly hot when given the opportunity, as you can see across all our Panther Lake-chipped laptops.

You can also start to see where the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i gets its extra performance from. Its CPU is beefier, and occasionally jumps well over the 100 degree mark—while its 175 W RTX 5080 also likes to suck down power and turn it into heat, as well as frames.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 battery life

The new G16 manages an impressive 117 minute gaming battery life figure, sending it to the top of my chart. It's only five minutes more than the older model, but I'd still say that's a pretty good win. It's also relatively light on the battery during a regular working day, which means I haven't felt the need to lug the charger around as often as I would with other gaming laptops.

Gaming battery life

Results recorded in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test, with screen brightness set to 50% and Wi-Fi disabled

PCMark 10 gaming battery life test (minutes)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

117

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H

112

MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

104

Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H

102

Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX

73

037.575112.5150

PCMark 10 gaming battery life test (minutes) Data

Product	Value
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2026) | RTX 5080 (135 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	117
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) | RTX 5080 (120 W) | Core Ultra 9 285H	112
MSI Stealth 16 AI+ | RTX 5080 (125 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	104
Razer Blade 16 (2026) | RTX 5090 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 386H	102
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 | RTX 5080 (175 W) | Core Ultra 9 275HX	73

The G16 reigns supreme in the gaming battery life stakes, and it's clear to see the portable advantage of our slim and light laptops over the much chonkier, slightly old-school Lenovo.

That 117 minute result equates to 13 minutes more than the MSI Stealth 16 AI+, 15 minutes more than the Razer, and a massive 44 minutes longer than the Lenovo.

Again I'm reminded of why you might want to sacrifice gaming performance for portability, beyond the convenience of shoving a slimmer machine in your bag. The Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 may be a lot quicker, but it's got a lot of disadvantages over the Asus G16, too.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 aesthetics

The aluminium G16 has always been one of my favourite laptop designs, and little has changed with the 2026 model. This version's silver-y frame (Eclipse Gray, if you ask Asus) is tastefully neutral to behold, looking more like an executive business laptop than a gaming machine.

Which means it'll look as good in the boardroom as it does on your desk. Many modern gaming laptops overplay their hand when it comes to the gamer aesthetic, which can leave you feeling like a bit of a plum when you want to answer some emails in an airport departure lounge.

No such worries here. The only hint that the G16 might be a gaming model comes in the form of the font on the keyboard, which still looks like it'd be better suited to a Star Citizen control panel than an all-business laptop design. I doubt anyone will really notice, though.

All this being said, if I had to pick the best looking laptop of the current crop (and the one with the better keyboard, thanks to its longer, more positive switch travel) it'd be the Razer Blade 16.

The Asus is a very pretty gaming laptop, but the Blade 16 is just plain purposeful. Moody, even. And as a tempestuous so-and-so myself, I like that. Plus, the Razer's trackpad is a little nicer to use, even if the G16's is also rather good.

The G16's 240 Hz ROG Nebula OLED panel, though, is a genuine competitor with the Blade's similarly-specced model. It's lush, vibrant, and delivers pretty much everything you could want out of a gaming laptop display. Sitting the two side by side, it's quite difficult to tell which has the better screen of the two.

Perhaps the Blade, if I was really pushed. Still, the G16 has nothing to be ashamed of in the display department.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 software

The Asus Armoury Crate software package isn't the most straightforward of affairs, I have to admit. Still, the switching options between power modes are easy to find, and a click on an image depicting the laptop itself (which isn't as obvious as it sounds) leads to plenty of extra options for customising the lighting, process handling, keybinds, and more.

The home page shows real time info for the CPU, GPU, and memory, along with readouts for the fan speeds. There's also a "Playground" menu in the sidebar that allows you to sync the lighting between various Asus products, adjust wallpapers, and all that sort of jazz.

If I had a major critique of the software (and Armoury Crate is far from alone in this regard), it's that it feels very… bitty. All the info and customisation options you can think of are in here. Somewhere. If you look hard enough.

A straightforward selection of menus, rather than a host of buttons, toggles, and sliders scattered all over the shop, would make the whole thing gel together a little more seamlessly.

There's also a greyed-out "Manual" power option, which is adjusted via a separate menu. Here you can tweak the CPU and GPU clock speeds, along with the option to boost the TGP of the latter all the way up to a 160 W top limit. The Asus reviewer's guide recommends you do this with the fan speeds pegged at 100%— which, as you might expect, is very loud.

Armoury Crate also provides you with a warning screen as you confirm the settings, absolving Asus from any responsibility if things go wrong. Which is enough to make you cross your fingers when you're testing the limits of a $4,800 gaming laptop, let me tell you.

We don't normally test overclocked gaming laptops beyond the Turbo or standard Maximum presets, but I put in my earplugs and ran the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark regardless.

At top wattage settings (and at 1600p with DLSS Quality and 2x frame gen. enabled) this resulted in a 99 fps average, with 83 fps 1% lows. Essentially, a four fps gain in terms of average frames over the 135 W Turbo mode.

I also recorded an 84 degree peak from the GPU during the benchmark, which seems a little on the hot side to me. The marginal gains, plus the very loud fans and toastier peak GPU temps, don't endear me to the whole idea of messing with the GPU wattage in a machine this slim. It's a nice option to have, but I'd stick to the presets if I were you.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 value

And so we reach a crucial point. The concept of "value" and the term "gaming laptop" are two very difficult things to square in 2026, and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 2026 is a prime example of why. It's a lovely machine, and one I wish I didn't have to mark down over such trifling concerns as, y'know, money.

But the facts are simple. My review sample is $4,800, and that's far too much to pay for an RTX 5080 lappy. Even if it does come with 64 GB of RAM, for reasons that still elude me.

Luckily, the 32 GB version is a fair bit cheaper. I've found one for $4,400 at Best Buy, although it's still got a somewhat-miserly 1 TB SSD. For this sort of cash, I'd definitely be wanting more room for my games—and I'd want it included as part of the package, rather than having to make a pricey component upgrade for myself.

Here's another issue. The Razer Blade 16 2026, a laptop that, in my estimation, is even more desirable than the G16, is available in a RTX 5080 + 1 TB SSD config for $4,000. That's a $400 saving over the equivalent G16, and far from chump change. Plus it's got the same Intel chip, another excellent OLED panel, and a chassis, keyboard, and trackpad design that's got the G16 2026 beat. Even if it's just by a nose.

In previous years, both the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 and the smaller, 14-inch G14 have been recurring entries on our gaming laptop deals page. I know, because I'm the one that updates it. Often, RTX 5070 and RTX 5080 variants have dropped down well below the $2,000 mark, and that's made them fantastic value for what you end up receiving.

This time around, though, I've got a feeling it might be different. The memory crisis continues to rip its way through the gaming laptop market, and I don't think we're likely to see such heavy price reductions on these new 2026 models.

Unless they stop selling entirely, or you're prepared to wait for the Black Friday sales. It's a hard thing to judge, but I don't think I've got that small crumb of comfort to lean on—at least not in the same way I might have done previously.

All of which is to say, I think the G16 is a fantastic high-end gaming device, with a gorgeous OLED display and plenty to recommend it for. But it's hugely over-priced as things stand, and that's a fatal flaw hanging over the head of what is otherwise a highly-recommendable gaming laptop.

If you can find one with a healthy discount? Go for it. At full price, though? I'd urge you to check out the Razer lineup instead. Your money goes further, and the machine you'll end up with… well, it simply has the edge.

It's tough going for anyone looking to upgrade or replace their SSD in today's market. Prices are higher than ever and you'd have to be pretty lucky to find some sucka still selling for yesteryear's price tags. What I'm highlighting today isn't a historically good deal, but it is a decent one by today's standards. It sucks, but if you really need an SSD right now, this would make a mighty boot drive.

You can grab the Crucial P510 for $174 over at Amazon. The catch? It's shipping from Amazon Germany.

• Take a look at the other discounted SSDs we've spotted or follow us on WhatsApp

Amazon includes import duties, taxes and fees in the price at checkout, and with free international delivery and $15.42 in added tax for a shipping address in New York, the total comes to $189.21. As far as I've seen, that's still the cheapest name-brand PCIe 5.0 SSD out there. It's even cheaper than some lesser-known brands.

The Crucial P510 would make for a great boot drive, with seq. read speeds up to 11,000 MB/s and seq. write speeds up to 8,500 MB/s. On all counts, higher than a comparable PCIe 4.0 drive. And we have spotted a few of those on offer as of late—again, for higher than usual prices due to the memory crisis, but comparable cheaper than most—with the Biwin NV7400 being the best among them for price/performance. That's still $175 for 1 TB.

The 1 TB capacity for this P510 is far from ideal. We used to prefer 2 TB for most use cases, even a boot drive, but the memory crisis has swiftly curbed our expectations. Those cost a whole lot more these days: roughly $251, which is actually less cash per GB than most 1 TB. So, if you're feeling frivolous...

We're definitely going to see these Crucial drives dry up eventually. Micron, who owns the Crucial brand, killed it when the memory crisis started kicking off. For anyone that doesn't know, the memory crisis is caused by huge AI spend on all types of memory, from the NAND used here to DDR5 used elsewhere in our PCs, and they're not leaving any supply for the rest of us. Micron, one of the three big memory manufacturers, went all-in on enterprise and just killed the very popular Crucial brand off altogether. Boo!

If you want more on the Crucial P510, you can read our review. Just remember, our Zak wrote it before we spiralled into another terrible mess, hence why it's called "affordable". Nowadays, even if we're saving a pennies, it's definitely overpriced. But if you need an boot drive imminently and you cannot wait for all this to blow over (that could take a while), it's worth a look.

👉 Check out all of Amazon's SSD deals 👈

If you spend your time editing videos, you may have already invested in a macropad. Or, you're probably used to the monotony of spamming shortcuts on your keyboard to swap between different tools. This can be a pain on the wrist because of the angle you hover over a keyboard, but there's now a new way around it—the humble Nintendo Wii Nunchuk.

As spotted by Hackaday, John Dingley, of YouTube account John's Projects, posted their latest creation last week. In essence, they've hooked a Wii Nunchuk up to their PC using the Anavi Handle to use it like a macropad.

The Anavi Handle is an open-source USB adapter for connecting the Nunchuk controller to a computer. The adapter uses the Seeed Studio Xiao RP2040, which, at just a couple of dollars, makes the entire setup surprisingly cheap.

You might be wondering why they used the Nunchuk, and it's not just to be a little geeky. The Wii Nunchuk is comfortable and light, as it was designed for a family-friendly console. And most importantly, you can hold it upright.

For a video editor who is likely spending hours at their desk at a time, the hope is that it won't cause pain in their wrist from holding it on the desk all day. John claims it is "super comfortable" and that it is "one of the most ergonomic things ever made".

Their current shortcut controls are:

• Lower end pushbutton = Split clip
• Upper end pushbutton = Not assigned yet (i.e. spare)
• Joystick-LEFT = Ripple Delete
• Joystick-RIGHT = UNDO (the previous action)

The Nunchuck plugged into the Anavi Handle won't work as a macropad immediately. It does require some coding, but Dingley has gone over that process in his video, too.

The use of the Nunchuck specifically came about because Dingley realised they didn't actually use all the buttons on their standard macropad. They still have a keyboard on hand for typing text, but the Nunchuck means they can put the macropad away.

Admittedly, this use case is a little niche. The reason one might opt for professional equipment like the DaVinci Speed Editor is partly due to the breadth of buttons available. The Nunchuk has a limited number of functions, so it will only really be useful to someone who only finds themselves needing a handful of functions for each edit.

But still, if you just want to cut clips, undo mistakes, and swap between a few tools quickly, it seems like a smart way of doing so, and it looks pretty neat at the same time. I'm sold.

ChatTJB, according to its Crunchbase profile, is a service that "provides a personal conversational response where an individual directly receives, processes, and writes answers to user inquiries". That's technically true, but not in the way you think… because it's just sorta some guy.

Futurism got to sit down with Tucker Bryant, the man behind ChatTJB, and as you might be able to expect, he admits, "I tend to overcommit to bits."

If you're wondering how far he's willing to commit to the bit, Bryant rented out a billboard for $6,000, which says ChatTJB is the "leading chat interface powered by AI". AI in this case stands for 'Average individual".

He has reportedly been personally writing responses to users over 1000 times a day since starting the project, answering questions on what to eat for dinner, what colour to paint their homes, and he has even given relationship advice.

As Futurism notes, "Like a chatbot, he can also generate images upon request— in the form of graphics that he hastily sketches, of course."

Bryant is a Stanford graduate and a former Google employee who claims the idea came off the back of his partner telling him about "cognitive surrender". Effectively, it's argued that those who use AI chatbots are likely to blindly trust the information given to them, even when the information is incorrect.

Bryant says, "We often, or increasingly, trust LLM outputs so easily that we stop bringing our own creativity or critical thinking into the responses we receive, and over time that weakens our ability to be fully-functioning, sovereign human beings in the world."

Though Bryant was expecting some trolls and acknowledges ChatTJB is a bit of a troll itself, he says it has been "really sweet" to chat with real people and even noticed some users asking more serious questions. One user reportedly said, "I’m on the first night of my honeymoon and I don’t feel relaxed, is that okay?" and Bryant "switched out of super-casual-mode into supportive-friend-mode.”

Though that does raise some concerns. If users are talking to ChatTJB and are under the impression they are talking to an AI anonymously, they could reveal personal information in the process to another human being. That could become more of a concern as ChatTJB has seen interest from users online who want to become the bot on ChatTJB.

However, Bryant is taking it slowly and figuring out how to get volunteers involved. "This was just intended to be an art project. I think it’s beautiful that people want to do something less ridiculous with it than what I had planned."

He continues, "I also don’t want people to get hurt, so I’d rather people wait a long time for their prompts than open the floodgates to anyone and everyone. So, a long preamble to saying: I’m starting to let some approved volunteers try answering questions while testing out some moderation tools."

Bryant argues that ChatTJB is a satire of AI and the culture surrounding AI advertising. “That’s the highbrow answer. But the lowbrow answer is just as authentic, which is that I also thought it would be funny."

Bryant is not explicitly anti-AI, though. He says on his Instagram, "AI can do some really cool things, but sometimes all you really need is to talk with an average individual."

World bosses have been a part of the World of Warcraft player's diet since classic—in case you haven't played the game, what separates a world boss from any other raid encounter is the fact that it's (self-explanatorily) out in the world, something you need to party up to defeat without going into a cave somewhere.

That's changing with WoW's next patch, Curse of Ula'tek, as world bosses are shifting to a "lair" format. Essentially, they'll function like one-boss delves with larger groups—that also gives them the benefit of having scaling difficulties, all the way up to 15-25 man Mythic. You can queue up for them like you would any other dungeon.

I got to speak with lead encounter designer Taylor Sanders about plans for patch 12.1 about why Blizzard's chosen to experiment with world bosses in particular: "So historically, world bosses go all the way back, right, to like the green dragons and the Lord Kazzaks and stuff that many players know and love from Classic and beyond.

"Lately, we found in recent updates and recent expansions that these experiences have really been a little bit lackluster… A lot of players just cluster into a boss. It drops in a few moments. In the worst case, you might have to hop between servers to find a group where maybe the boss is up or the boss is attackable."

I can't say I disagree with Sanders, here—while there's a simple joy in joining an ongoing zerg rush, it's not as though I'm engaging with the games' systems beyond just pushing my buttons when I'm whacking one of these things. There might, on occasion, be an AoE I need to dodge or something, but I couldn't tell you one modern world bosses' mechanics from another.

That's mostly because of changing assumptions about difficulty. Some of those classic world bosses are iconic because they were allowed to be tough, or have punishing mechanics that required coordination to avoid—but because world content in WoW has now become part of casual play, those mechanics just wouldn't work for folks trying to get their dailies.

Imagine if, for instance, a world boss in retail had Lord Kazzak's "Capture Soul" ability, wherein if he kills anybody he heals for 70,000 HP—around 10% of his health. You'd never kill the dang thing.

"Going into the Curse of Ula'tek update," Sanders adds, "We really wanted to reimagine what a world boss could really be and try to make sure that if you are engaging with a world boss, you're having—not only an accessible experience, but you're also having a reasonable combat experience and you have a fun time fighting a boss."

The experience of finding a group itself has changed, too—again, back in the day, you'd meticulously recruit folks from either your guild or general chat. Your average non-Classic MMO player doesn't have the appetite for that sort of thing anymore, so modern WoW uses a streamlined looking for group interface where you can register for groups.

Only, the depersonalisation of that means, as Sanders points out, you can join just as a world boss is dying, or when it's at 5% HP, or something—it does, admittedly, feel janky: "We're hoping that this can get players out of the interface of trying to find a different group … To help players through that process, so they can just get in and get fighting the creature and get their loot faster."

Not that it doesn't have trade-offs. Again, there's something pleasingly chaotic and distinctly MMO about joining a mess of particle effects, or stumbling across a group already doing a raid boss—and that'll be lost if lairs become the way of doing things: "It's very rare that when you're designing something new, or trying to create a new experience for players, that you don't have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sense of coming upon something where you're in the midst of the action, right? Or you're coming upon an event that is in progress.

"But we really felt like that was a good trade-off for us to make, to lose that aspect of it, if players are going to have a better combat experience against the encounter."

It's always a fascinating bit of tension, to me—MMOs are in their nature an evolving genre, mostly in how their playerbases evolve with them. The rigid hardcore/casual divide is a thing of the past, and it seems to me that the state of WoW's world bosses were a symptom of that—an attempt to make something that was for ambitious raiders part of casual content. Now it's all on a sliding scale.

If one thing is true about AI, it's that there's a lot of money in it. Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company because of its role in the explosion of AI data centers, and OpenAI has been rounding up tens of billions in investments. So you'd think AI companies could buy pretty much whatever they want—but one farming family in Northern Kentucky showed that's not the case by turning down a $26 million bid.

As reported by WKRC-TV Local 12, Ida Huddleston was offered the sum for half of her 1,200-acre farmland this year, which an unnamed company would turn into an AI data center. Huddleston's daughter, Delsia Bare, reportedly said she would "stay and hold and feed a nation" and that "$26 million doesn't mean anything."

AI data centers have become an ethical and ideological battleground, with Elon Musk's SpaceXAI only this week agreeing to take down 69 temporary methane turbines in Memphis over the next year in reaction to resident concerns over local disruption.

In this case, Bare claims there's history to the site that the data center company would be ignoring. She told Local 12, “My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it." She continues, “[They] even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn’t have anything else.”

Bare claims to be among "dozens of landowners" approached by the anonymous buyer, who reportedly represents a major AI company. Notably, Local 12 claims that the land where Bare lives is worth around $6,000 per acre, which makes the offer around ten times the actual value.

Huddleston tells Local 12, “They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not. We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water—and that poison. Well, we know we’ve had it.”

Huddleston is also sceptical of claims of economic growth as a result of the AI data center. “I say they’re a liar, and the truth isn’t in them. That’s what I say. It’s a scam.”

Data center pushback has been a common theme of the growth of AI, with concerns of both an environmental and ethical nature being front and centre. And AI companies have a lot of money to throw around.

Even if you own a lot of land, $26 million must be a life-changing amount of money to anyone but the richest of the rich; it would even be enough to buy some of the RAM that AI data centers have been gleefully sucking up over the last few years. Just a thought.

Keeping on top of chipset driver updates is a boring, but necessary part of maintaining a modern PC. Unfortunately, both myself and fellow hardware nerd Jacob Fox have run into an issue with the AMD Install Manager, which attempts to install the latest chipset driver and fails miserably on both our machines.

Very unhelpfully, the failed installer points to a general error page, which blitheringly suggests a whole host of vague, unrelated PC update conflicts might be to blame. I even reinstalled the entire AMD Adrenaline driver package in the hopes of an easy fix, to no avail.

However, you'll be pleased to know that a manual chipset update package exists, as spotted by Reddit user Life_Recognition_963. Simply download the individual installer at the bottom of the 8.07.16.1035 release notes page, run and reboot, and voila, the tyranny of trying to keep your machine up to date is kept at bay once again.

It seems like the AMD Install Manager might be pointing at the wrong link, or providing a package that fails to install on a large number of machines. The accompanying Reddit thread is full of users complaining about the same issue, so the problem seems fairly widespread.

For what its worth, I'm running an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X on an ageing Gigabyte X670 mobo, while our Dr Fox is using a Ryzen 7 7800X3D with an Asus B650EM Max Gaming board. Looking at the reports, though, the issue seems to be chip and motherboard agnostic.

All's well that ends well I guess, but keeping your chipset drivers (and all the other drivers on your machine) in tip-top condition is a good way of getting ahead of future issues. Unless the drivers themselves have problems, in which case stuff might break.

It can be a minefield, maintaining a gaming PC in 2026. Still, if only all fixes were as easy as downloading a separate installer package, ey?

A new report suggests New Zealand born actor Sam Neill, who passed away in July, will appear in the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda film adaptation. According to Deadline's sources, filming for the Nintendo and Sony collaboration wrapped in April, just months before the star's death.

While Neill's appearance hasn't been confirmed by Sony, the late star will appear alongside three newly confirmed actors. Uli Latukefu, best known for his role in Young Rock, will play Ganondorf. Dichen Lachman and Yvonne Strahovski, who have appeared in Severance and The Handmaid's Tale respectively, will play yet-to-be-specified roles. These join a cast including Bo Bragason (Renegade Nell) as Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Son of a Critch) as Link.

It's not the only posthumous appearance for Neill: he'll also appear in Godzilla x Kong: Supernova and The Last Resort in 2027. As for The Legend of Zelda, that's scheduled for an April 30 release. It was filmed in Neill's native New Zealand.

Neill died suddenly on July 13 in Sydney, Australia. "The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free," an official statement read, alluding to the actor's struggle with blood cancer.

The Legend of Zelda is directed by Wes Ball, whose recent work includes Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Maze Runner. Shigeru Miyamoto is onboard as a producer.

As soon as Fields of Mistria 1.0 landed I rushed to shove gifts into my lovers' faces and drag them on dates to hustle my way to the coveted 10 heart threshold for marriage, only to find out that, woof, crafting an engagement ring is a real investment! The material cost isn't actually that steep if you've already played a lot, but it does require you to get to the final level of the mines. I'd sort of neglected unlocking those final seals while totally engrossed in friendship grinding, which was apparently the wrong thing to do.

How to craft an engagement ring

To craft an engagement ring, you have to reach level 100 in the mines to unlock additional recipes for The Dragon Forge on level 90. After you make a Dragon-Forged Core, you can craft an engagement ring at a normal blacksmithing station.

Engagement ring recipe:

• 2 Diamonds
• 4 Mistril ingots
• 4 Gold ingots
• 1 Dragon-Forged Core (craft at The Dragon Forge on mines level 90)
  • 5 Monster core
  • 1 Mistril ingot
  • 1 Pink diamond
  • 1 Ancient firefly
  • 1 Medium essence stone

Engagement ring materials shortcuts

You can't just throw down the cash for an engagement ring outright, but you can pay your way to avoid some of the material grinding if you're ore poor but have tons of tesserae.

What you can buy or craft:

• Buy 40 gold ore from the blacksmith for 8,000 tesserae
  • Craft 4x gold ingots at the blacksmithing station
• Buy 50 mistril ore from the blacksmith for 20,000 tesserae
  • Craft 5 mistril ingots at the blacksmithing station (1 extra ingot is for the Dragon-Forged core you need to craft)
• Buy a Large Bundle of Stone to get 100 stone (you need 90) at the carpenter shop for 2,000 tesserae
  • Craft 2 diamonds at the stone refinery (in the mines entrance) with 70 stone
  • Craft 1 medium essence stone at the stone refinery with 20 stone

What you need to find or grind:

• 5 monster cores
  • Dropped by lantern enemies (mines levels 1-39) or by flame spirits (mines levels 61-99)
• 1 pink diamond
  • Mine pink diamond nodes (mines levels 81+)
  • OR take your partner on a gem cutting date on Saturday or Sunday for a chance to get one as a reward
• 1 ancient firefly
  • Catch with a net in the Ancient Ruins (mines level 81+)

There are now three Magic: The Gathering cards for Sting, the magic sword Bilbo claims from the troll hoard. To be fair, they're all mechanically distinct. In The Lord of the Rings set there was an artifact card called Sting, the Glinting Dagger, and an instant called Hobbit's Sting that did more damage the more food you had. Several the hobbit-themed cards are empowered the more food tokens you have piled up, which is a flavorsome idea.

The upcoming Hobbit set adds a card called Sting, Bilbo's Sword, which uses the new mechanic hone, which lets you add +1/+0 to a creature with equipment—a mechanic that mostly shows up on dwarf cards. As you may remember, there are a lot of dwarves in The Hobbit.

There are also now three cards for the One Ring. The Hobbit set adds My Precious, representing the Ring as Gollum's, whereas The Lord of the Rings set had it as both Bilbo's Ring and in its final form as The One Ring. (There was also an instant called Slip on the Ring to represent the act of using it.) Again, the cards are all mechanically distinct and depict a different aspect of Tolkien's story. But at the same time, it's tough to see the slight differences between the 2023 Middle-earth set and the 2026 one as demanding a whole separate release.

There are a couple of other brand new mechanics alongside hone. The dwarves get storied, a condition that activates when they have "three or more artifacts, legendaries, and/or Sagas" and has different consequences based on the dwarf. Dáin, Lord of the Iron Hills, for instance, makes your opponent pay a point of mana for each creature they want to attack you with if you're storied enough to deserve it.

The humans of Laketown get recruit, which lets them draw a card and discard one, giving them a 1/1 human soldier if that discard was a nonland card. Meanwhile, amass, which was used to build armies of orcs in The Lord of the Rings, can here be used for armies of goblins—only fair since The Hobbit doesn't use the word orc for its equivalent monsters.

Each of these additions is fine, and I'm pleased to see several new adventure cards in this set, and the return of saga cards based on Tolkien's songs, because The Hobbit includes such bangers as Roll-Roll-Roll-Roll and the goblin singalong classic Burn, Burn, Tree and Fern. There's definitely a more whimsical edge to this set, with dancing bears and trolls turning to stone, making it feel more like the charming talking-animal set Bloomburrow, which is no bad thing.

But I'm glad it's a smaller release than the deluxe-sized Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth was. Nobody in their right mind would try to stretch something based on The Hobbit to be the same size as The Lord of the Rings, would they? Surely not.

Magic: The Gathering The Hobbit will be in prerelease from August 7–13, with a digital release in Arena on August 11, and its full tabletop release on August 14.

A very Quake-themed QuakeCon kicked off today, with John Romero and current id studio co-director Marty Stratton speaking on a panel celebrating the shooter's 30th anniversary. A new 19-level Quake episode was announced and released during the panel, which also featured a brief livestreamed appearance from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor.

Reznor famously composed the music for Quake, which was a very big deal at the time. If ever there was a more 1996 cultural artefact than Quake I don't know what it could be (maybe Space Jam?). Reznor's industrial tumult definitely fit the grimier, darker, browner mood of Quake, compared to the MIDI thrash metal of Doom. I remember sometimes having to mute the music because it made me feel too tense.

"When I first encountered Wolfenstein it felt impossible," Reznor said. "Nothing was like that. It was a radical departure from what I'd known as videogames. I went out and bought a PC just to play it."

But it was Doom that sealed the deal. "Jump ahead a few years, Doom comes out, and it was like a bomb went off," he went on. "It was not only technologically advanced, but there wasn't anything like that. It felt like no adults were involved, nobody said no, it was free, and it was fantastic. In some ways I felt a parallel with what I was trying to do with music, by misshaping things and trying to express myself. I really felt a connection to it."

"[I] crossed paths with the id guys and hit it off, became friends, and I'm grateful to be invited to be part of the Quake team working on music and sound effects. And you know of all the things I've done in my career I'm extremely proud of that, and I think the game holds up today."

Reznor was hardly going to make an appearance at QuakeCon in order to distance himself from Quake and its soundtrack, but it's interesting to hear him draw parallels between Doom and his own music at the time. It's a reminder that the nowadays quaint-looking shooter seemed utterly terrifying in 1993. I remember the music in E1M3 sending shivers down my spine. The first pinkie demon encounter in that level prompted a quick shutting down of the game. Similarly terrifying: hearing the radio edit of Closer on the top 40 countdown.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Quake, a bunch of Nine Inch Nails Quake-themed gear has been released. You can get an ammo box (it really is just a $30 empty box), a t-shirt, a keychain, a hoodie, and the soundtrack has been reissued on vinyl. It's all extraordinarily expensive but you may find yourself buying it anyway.

Just a smidge over 30 years after its original release date, Quake just got a big update. MachineGames has added a new chapter to id Software's landmark 1996 successor to the Doom games, dubbed Dawn of the Machine.

The 19 new levels, which join two previous MachineGames expansions, see Quake's protagonist trapped in "a dimension of endless illusion." I'm most curious about some promised new weapon variants: "the Super Axe—unleashing lightning on successive strikes—and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle."

The update also adds a gallery of archival material from Quake's development, including a handful of playable levels that were created early in development and never finished.

The creative process on display is decidedly relatable, with level names like "Tim" "Tim10A," and "Tim14," and notes like, "Lots of tight hallways make navigation tough, and similarly there are many dead ends that were not completed, so it is not entirely clear what the idea was."

The update was revealed at QuakeCon today in a panel which included id Software co-founder John Romero, who noted with laughter that the announcement was occurring not on the 30th anniversary of Quake, which released in June of 1996, but on the 30th anniversary of the day he left id Software.

Quake famously marked the end of an era for id: Romero, American McGee, Michael Abrash, Sandy Petersen and others left the company after its development. Petersen said recently that "Quake ruined id Software."

But ruined or not, the studio carried on and released two of my favorite games, Quake 2 and 3, and everything else that came after, including the much lauded run of modern Doom games.

Id now faces a new kind of adversity following substantial layoffs imposed by Microsoft as part of its plan to "reset" the Xbox business.

"This is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month," id Software co-founder John Carmack said in reaction to the news.

Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall are all scheduled to appear at a founders reunion panel on Saturday for "a rare conversation about the company's earliest days, and the friendships, challenges, and innovations that have forever changed gaming."

Five years after going public on the London Stock Exchange, indie publisher Devolver Digital wants to go back to being a private company. In a message posted on the company's website, Devolver's board of directors delivered a frank assessment of the company's current state, saying they believe it is undervalued—in large part because of inherent incompatibilities between the videogame industry and the stock market.

There's plenty of procedural guffola to dig through in the announcement if that's your thing, but what's especially interesting to me are Devolver's reasons for wanting to withdraw from the exchange. It's possibly the most succinct 'creating value for shareholders is going to kill us all' filings I've ever read.

Devolver went public in November 2021, a move CEO Douglas Morin said at the time would "ensure our continued growth and support even more wonderful games. Most importantly, it will allow us to retain our culture." But it seems that the opposite has happened: Devolver said in this new filing that in the years since then, the videogame industry has faced "significant disruption and volatility, characterised by widespread layoffs for studios and publishers, platform rationalisation and substantial impairments across the industry."

As a result of that industry-wide instability, "Devolver has faced the ongoing challenge of delivering growth in line with market expectations despite those difficult sector conditions." That in turn has seen the company's valuation plummet, because "the lifetime and long-tail revenue delivery inherent in the videogames business" are essentially non-factors.

In case that's not sufficiently clear, the filing goes on to state that Devolver's value is linked to "the timing and scale" of new game releases, which are not always the most predictable things. That's also incompatible with the market's emphasis on "predictable, sequential growth," the filing states, and Devolver "has at times faced increased pressure to deliver short-term market expectations that do not necessarily reflect the underlying long-term value creation potential of its portfolio and development pipeline."

Going private isn't just for the good of the games and those who love them: Devolver's board also believes it can save roughly $1.6 million annually as a private company, for one thing, and its shares aren't really seeing much trading action, so being on the market isn't doing much good anyway.

But the emphasis is clearly on avoiding the pitfalls that responsibility to shareholders bring: the layoffs, cancellations, and studio closures that have characterized the last few years of the game industry. Actions are louder than words and all that, but after years of watching the videogame industry be relentlessly decimated because growth isn't happening fast enough, I'll take this as a start.

"Being private will allow the Devolver Digital team, especially the finance, legal, and executive team, to singularly focus on the long-term health of the company and less on satisfying the requirements of the public market, which have nothing to do with being a successful game publisher," a Devolver rep said in a statement to GamesIndustry.

A vote on the proposal to take Devolver private again will happen in September.